Biography
Raised in Los Angeles and trained in New York, Andrew Rose earned his A.B. in Art History from Vassar College in 1993, and a dual-honors M.F.A./M.S. in Painting and Art History from Pratt Institute in 2003. Growing up in a family where Hawaii was home-away-from-home since the early 1960s, he settled permanently in Honolulu in 2005.
For over 25 years, Andrew Rose has pursued an award-winning career as an artist, curator, educator, gallerist, journalist, and producer in the U.S., Europe, and Hawaii with Bruce Weber Studio, Catwalk Foundation, Florida Hospital - Orlando, Fundación Valparaiso, Hawaii State Art Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art, Martha Keats Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, New York - PS1, National Portrait Gallery - London, Nuuanu Gallery, Pratt Institute, the Target Corporation, Vermont Studio Center, and his eponymous Andrew Rose Gallery.
He has published in and received press for his work from publications including Artweek, Hana Hou!, Hawaii Luxury, Honolulu Magazine, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Honolulu Weekly, Innov8, Modern Luxury Hawaii, NYArts, and The Orlando Sentinel.
From 2006 - 2020, Rose was an instructor at the Honolulu Museum of Art, teaching hundreds of adults university-level coursework in painting, drawing, and professional practices both in the studio and on location. Between 2006 and 2010, he was Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Island Pacific Academy on Oahu where he wrote and taught the Advanced Placement arts program. Having written curricula for hundreds of students from ages 18 – 80, Rose continues to develop a wealth of real-world classroom-based experience through independent teaching of students en plein air.
From 2011 - 2016, after opening his contemporary art gallery in Honolulu and then joining the boards of various art and charitable institutions including the Hawaii State Art Museum, Rose pursued the daily business of being a professional artist while curating a museum-quality program of contemporary art with significant connections to the Hawaiian Islands. Through a variety of solo and group exhibitions with dozens of artists, he brought over $750,000 of new art to market.
In 2016, Rose returned to his full-time studio practice with a commission for a permanent mural at the Florida Hospital - Orlando, where he worked for six months on a 45-foot scaffolding to paint a site-specific work for the lobby of the new $125-million dollar wing for women’s health.
Since the pandemic of 2020, Rose resumed his long-term plein air painting project about Hawaii’s rapidly changing environment and launched both andrewrose.pro to showcase studio tech as well as Swell Direction to provide creative consulting.
As of 2023, Rose is working on an unprecedented series of monumental plein air murals.
Statement
My studio practice starts with the question:
“When is the beginning of beautiful?”
To answer it, one must first investigate where the epistemological (“When is the beginning of [our knowledge]…”) meets the aesthetic (…“[and appreciation of the] beautiful [in all its myriad forms]?”).
It is this breakpoint - the heart-skipping-a-beat feeling when pre-cognition awakens into an appreciation of beauty - that interests me and is the goal of my painting.
Painting this nexus in an effort to manifest the theoretical through the technical requires both subject and style to be liminal in service of one another so this breakpoint of appreciation is precipitated by threshold imagery.
Balancing abstract yet specific compositions from the universal patterns of our everyday lives is the best way I’ve found to illuminate the question. My vocabulary is made from purposeful marks and resonant colors based on looking at real things. My ostensible subjects, whether a horizon as a meditation on space or brushstrokes as a study of light, attempt to make the familiar fresh. My favorite compliments are when people swear they recognize one of my originals from the wild or they report the world through my visual language: “There was an Andrew Rose sky last night.”
In all of my work, when I’ve been successful, my audience feels they know my art even though they are sure they have never seen it before.
During my graduate studies, I read how Manet, the urbane great-grandfather of Contemporary painting who was the first artist to connect modernity to history, wrote a personal response to a student seeking inspiration.
"Let nature be your guide," he told her.
He remains my primary artistic touchstone, and his allegorization of sophisticated iconography through natural observation remains vital today. Getting outside, watching real events, being of one’s time and place: these activities lay the foundation of good art.
After earning my masters degrees that focused on representational imagery in oil, I began a new series of pieces on paper when I was an Artist-in-Residence at the remote finca of the Fundación Valparaiso in Mojácar, Spain in 2005. I undertook a vigorous exploration of abstraction using brushstroke and color in ways similar to how I first painted as a young man 20 years before.
I explored the boundaries, foundations, and interstices of the local land- and seascapes to discover what lies at the border of the beautiful. Little did I know then that these Spanish discoveries would become the fundamental material for my work for the next 15 years. While in residence, my paintings expanded to communicate ideas about water consolidated into something greater than itself as a metaphor for facts growing into knowledge. Those ideas turned into my early Aquarium Paintings, Swirls, and Calligraphics where fluid brushstrokes of washes, lines, and dots created seaweed dancing in the ocean and language floating in the sky.
By the time I returned to Hawaii later that year, I was full of new energy to paint larger works using similar water-media based techniques. The next new paintings on Oahu were Sketches for an Underwater Opera that combined the all the previous iconography into more complex works. Along with them came the Rain Paintings wherein sheets of raindrops undulated in front of flooded mountains after we were deluged by 40 days of storms and I had an unobstructed view from my studio on the Windward side.
Those new works, along with the works completed in Spain several years before contributed to my exhibition in 2008 which showed those Spanish and Hawaiian images inspired by clouds, rain, rainbows, the ocean, and mist. Metaphor as manifesto, Liminal was about what we saw at the corners of our vision, how we never truly understand what it is we think we are seeing, and the ways in which thousands of distinct lines, dots and layers of color collectively whisk us from the edge of apprehension to the place of comprehension.
When I opened my gallery in 2011, I was already planning what I might paint next, but Kaleidoscope, my inaugural solo exhibition in it, was something of a surprise. I produced a suite of medium to extra-large Rain Paintings exploring pattern. Each painting was a minimum of five to over fifteen layers of acrylic paint keyed to a color and subject - red suggested a fiesta, yellow was based on sunflowers, purple alluded to nebulae - and take their purpose of mark from Impressionism to express movement. The exhibition, painted entirely in 2012, developed out of the work I made from 2003 – 2008. It was designed and executed for the gallery and its particular dimensions to not only be conducive to appreciating canvases individually, but also as a collective experience.
Aether in 2013 was my next body of work in my continuing investigation of water as visual metaphor for how we see and what we know. Whereas Kaleidoscope was made of millions of brushstrokes, Aether used sfumato sponging to create softer forms. The small, medium and large canvases all showed interpretations of clouds seen from on high at both night and day. Aether is known from Classical philosophy as the Fifth Element, or the Quintessence. Beyond the main four elements of earth, air, fire and water, each with their own influence and impact on human nature and society, Aether is also the creative realm of spirit and the birthplace of gods. As a result, these images are composed from the perspective of dwelling within the upper atmosphere, not from the viewpoint of a person on terra firma. The canvases shimmer with metallic pigments and veils of color alluding to the ever-changing, indistinct world of Aether – a place where specifics yield to generalities, hard dissolves in soft, and known slips toward unknown.
For Plasma in 2014, after meditating on deep space for a couple of years, I had curated dozens of digital photographs from the Hubble telescope, the European Space Agency, and other sources of astrophysics because I thought they were sublime. More softly sponged shapes of rich chromatic relationships based on massing forms and dissipating materials were the subject of this last exhibition. They concluded my previous ten years of painting as the final suite in a series of works that began with my looking at the liminal starting at the bottom of the sea and ascending into outer space.
In 2017, I was commissioned by the Florida Hospital - Orlando to create a site-specific work, called Light, for their new $125-million Women’s Center. It was the centerpiece of their new three-story lobby. For over six months, I worked day and night on a scaffolding 45 feet high which was open to the public to see. The end result is an environmentally sensitive work that responds to and changes with the atmosphere throughout the year, taking advantage of the natural and artificial lighting of the architecture. Inspired by one of my Kaleidoscope images titled Danaë, which itself is based on the allegorical story of Zeus shining his golden light into Danaë, impregnating her with his divine spirit - a perfect and serendipitous subject for the women’s hospital.
For many years, landscape, color, and brushstroke have been major aesthetic elements in my abstract investigations of what lies at the edges of our conscious knowledge. Currently, I have renewed my study of Hawaii en plein air and am using representation to capture the fragile and fleeting natural landscape of the islands.
Andrew Rose
Honolulu
February, 2020