Red.
Not just any red, but a deep, bright, penetrating red that grabs you by the shoulders and intimates a crucial truth. For some that truth is passion. Others hate. Still more intensity, heat or suffering.
The color is in just about every new painting created by Seattle artist Bergen Rose. And to her the color evokes a life force, security and solace.
To the paintings themselves, particularly her work from 2006 to today, which feature a dot of red on the horizon of a misty surreal islandscape; a confident redhead (Rose) holding a red ball; a static woman seated outside, waiting for a train and clutching a red ball; the couple dancing on floating red planks; the little red boat in the foreground of a hopeful, sky-filled day; to each of these paintings the red brings out a balance that is pleasing to the eye.
"The red has to be there," Rose said. "I get really tense before it's there and it does represent some kind of life force. I have no other way to express it."
Her signature color she calls "juicy red," which is not an innate color but a mixture of primarily Golden-brand pyrrole red, an acrylic she gets, along with much of her other supplies from Daniel Smith shop south of downtown.
For some time, she lived and worked in a spacious studio on Whidbey Island, which proved to be an inspiration for the subject matter of her art. She recently moved into a very vertical townhouse in Fremont where the aroma of Thai food rises up in the afternoon air and where street parking doesn't exist. A small koi pond is wedged into game board back yard. There is printmaking equipment on the ground floor. It's where she refuels between painting projects. Lining the floor of the first staircase are portraits of family members, only they're ducks.
The second level opens onto a pristine and modern living space with sleek matching white couches, a large Norwegian landscape looming over the fireplace, hardwoods upon which her three shiatsus (Stanley, Tulip and Lily) skitter, and an anodized aluminum iMac that at the time played the latest offering from crooner Amos Lee. Rose fits perfectly with the modern interior: slim, black long-sleeve shirt and matching smock, red, shoulder-length hair set against white tattoos on her back and shoulder.
She loves her dogs. Her first dog, a 16-year-old shiatsu named Lulu, well documented with portraits, died last year. The emotional wound is still fresh. Rose's eyes shine behind her copper frames and the words won't come.
She is a mother and is currently dating Keiichi Nishimura a mixed media artist who along with ceramic artist Dan Ishler, currently shares the bill with Rose in an exhibit extended through Nov. 30 at the Northwest Craft Center & Gallery in Seattle Center.
Small landscapes lean against the pale carpet of the second flight of stairs which open onto her new studio space. The papered table where she sits and creates is smattered with dozens of colors and notes in pencil: Eat, Pray, Love - perhaps an homage to Elizabeth Gilbert's popular book of self discovery. On the table leans a large somewhat somber landscape, a memory of a view she had in Norway. On it were adorned test pieces of red felt. It's her latest project and she wasn't sure where the red was going to go. So she tests locations with felt, "until it feels right."
Also on the table is a small nondescript scrapbook filled with postcard-size memory paintings. When inspiration comes, she seizes the moment.
Done mostly with water color pencils, much of the book was filled with memories of Nepal, where Rose, a student of Tibetan Buddhism, remarked having never seen anything that beautiful in her entire life.
"I used to run out of my tent in the middle of the night in Nepal and then run back in and do a little painting," she said. Some, of the untouched rocky hillsides, took 10 minutes. Others such as the violet swath of Tibetan monks flowing by took much longer. She has visited Tibet five times in 10 years and remains fascinated with the history, beauty and culture. She recalled feeling like she was "on another planet" when she witnessed some monks exorcising dark spirits from a home.
She's been all over the world, Africa, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, and has captured powerful memories from each location, many of which become sources of inspiration for paintings. But not Sri Lanka.
She was there with a girlfriend when a military coup was taking place, rebels were shooting at people, bombs exploded and bullets literally whizzed by her. In the dark unknown, she and a friend ran for cover in a home with a light on. When they got there, they found a woman genuflecting and sobbing at the prostrate body of a loved one. They backed out of there and miraculously found refuge at a hotel where they hid for a week.
"It was so tense," she remembered. "It was horrible."
But death has also inspired the "Cycles" period of her artwork. With these paintings, it is white that illuminates the space. It is her interpretation of transcendence from life as we know it, largely inspired by her work at a hospice center on Whidbey Island. There is a dreamlike quality to each Cycle painting, particularly with the corvine elements that feature whispers of red. One in particular, called "Can You Hear Me?" was purchased by Camille Colaizzo, a friend and owner of Colaizzo Opticians on Queen Anne Hill.
Now, after nearly 30 years, and thousands of paintings in her portfolio, Rose has had two of her best years that included a successful showing at Whidbey's Open Studio Tour, and showing at the Northwest Craft Center & Gallery earlier this summer. She sold a number of works from these events, which nonetheless surprised her.
"It was kind of a surprise because you plug along in a dark hole and then you come up for air. I'm always surprised to sell work," she said with a modest laugh, while in the same breath mentioning renowned pop artist Ed Ruscha probably feeling the same way as bidders raised paddles at the likes of Sotheby's and Christie's.
Rose is a one-woman show, and she knows it. She creates the work but then has to market it herself. She knows she's been lacking at the latter, and these days, as her 401k dips like everyone else's, she wants to manage her career with a little more detail.
"I'd like a good gallery to represent me, but you have to keep on that," she said. "I have to focus on that."
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