Month: July 2022

Rosanne Potter paints in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, but her paintings vary greatly in style and palette. Never attempting a predictable style or look, each painting arises from the meeting of material, usually just paint (but sometimes sand, wax, or other collage materials) and canvas. The colors are chosen, but the structure of each work develops on its own.

Some characteristic moves can be noted: looping circular strokes, metallic surface flares, horizontal color fields displayed and interplayed. Though they reappear, these features are not present in all works or even all present in any one work. Each of her major paintings develops intrinsically without reference to anything done earlier. She has no interest in repetitively creating work that can be identified as hers from across the room.

The poet Yeats is reported to have said that he was always surprised by the poems that came from him. Potter, too, allows herself to be surprised by her work, for although she does not start with the intention to depict a body, a face, or any other object, readable images seem to emerge from the paint in ways that are mysterious to her. Sometimes the shapes that emerge have mythical significance: skulls, mirrors, birds, animals, buildings, planetary systems. These are not images she has in mind and brings to the canvas; they are paint that forms itself into shapes that she can “read” and afterwards elaborate consciously if she chooses. Sometimes she incorporates her readings into a title; usually she leaves titles open, so that viewers can find what they wish to read in the imagery of the
painting.

Potter began drawing informally as a young woman, by copying Picasso’s Woman Ironing. She took a studio art class with American Abstractionist Clarence Giese during her Institute of European Studies Junior Year Abroad in Vienna. Her professional career though followed from her MA at the University of Chicago and Ph.D. at the University of Texas in English Literature. At Iowa State University, where she spent her teaching career, she taught everything from Freshman English through graduate seminars on Virginia Woolf, Modern Drama and Women’s Studies. She only turned back to painting after early retirement to Key West where she took a painting workshop with Joachim Loeber, known then as “the last living German Expressionist” who coincidentally immigrated to and worked in Potter’s hometown, Westfield, NJ, and in her retirement home, Key West. Loeber taught technique rather than style: how different colors, paints, surface, and tools effect each other. An early product of his workshop was Key West, Transit of Venus, Poems and Paintings by Rosanne Potter (SeaStory Press, 2005).