Biography
Dawn Marie Rozzo has lived in Raleigh, NC for the past 20 years and has been a working artist and art educator for over 30 years. She grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, where she spent much of her childhood exploring the hills, creeks, and farmland surrounding her home. This landscape, the North Carolina seacoast, and her garden inform her art-making. When she is not working in her home studio, she is outside in the garden, or taking a walk in fields near her home. She lives with her husband and two nosey cats.
"If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere." Vincent Van Gogh
Artist Statement
My first visual inspiration is the rolling hills and woods of my childhood home in rural Pennsylvania. A long-time resident of North Carolina, I am equally inspired by the water, skies, and land of this beautiful state. I create semi-abstract works of florals, landscapes, and birds in dreamy environments in the studio.
I am attracted to the fleeting moments of the natural world: a lightning flash, the pose of a bird, the morning's changing light. These urge me to paint in a loose and interpretive manner using transparent washes of paint and gestural brushwork.
My semi-abstract collages are layered with materials which often include pages from recylced books, hand-made papers and found papers. I build the images on gessoed surfaces and create contrast between areas that are loose, fluid, and interpretive to areas that are more opaque, vibrant, and detailed. These collages are meditations of how we usually experience the natural world firmly embedded in the man-made one.
I invite my viewers to further imagine and articulate their experience with the natural world.
Dawn in front her
Red Door Studio. Painting is Swamp Water Melody