Throughout the upheavals of her life, art has been Rosemarie K. Robuck’s constant.
Creating art has carried her in love, loss, and across the wildly differing landscapes of the American South and Appalachians.
She grew up in the 1950s raising cows, candling eggs, and crossing creeks among the dense palmettos of a still-untamed Florida coast. She was influenced by the popular culture she saw in magazines, Andrew Wyeth, the post-Impressionists, and the narrative style of Norman Rockwell.
‘Tea Party’ | artist as a young girl
Working with her hands has rooted her creativity, and she continues to resist demarcations between craft and high art.
From a young age she threw herself into art classes and hoarded her lunch money for supplies. She continued to pursue her passion in college, landing at South Carolina’s Greenville Museum of Art, where she worked under Jeanet Dreskin, and was one of the first graduates from their fine art program in 1973. RKR would go on to achieve her BFA from the University of South Carolina.
‘Beached’ | Oil on Canvas
From there, RKR would live in towns and cities all across the south, and each would stamp an indelible mark on her style; the fragile petals of azaleas and the turquoise bay of Mobile informs her color choices; the snake-infested bayous of Baton Rouge ground her works in shadow; the dusty fields of rural South Carolina become negative space; violence–seeded in the underbelly of a Texas bar–is found in moments of dialectic tension that both fascinate and repel. The ancient Appalachians, where she settled and now lives, influences her sense of primitivism, and respect for traditional forms.
‘Rhythm & Blues’ | 2018
Outside of her studio, RKR also immersed herself in creation–whether it was a dress, a garden, a building, or doing needlework, carpentry, weaving, and pottery. She is especially influenced by Art Nouveau and William Morris, who wrote:
“If functionality is not similarly beautiful and elegant, it is not the solution.”
As a commercial designer she worked in oil-field mapping, pre-press, and from the mid-nineties onward managed her own graphic and web design business. Creation, to her, is about the wholeness of experience, the context, and the atmosphere. Where photography captures a moment, she feels art captures the evocative and sensory experience of that moment in absentia.
Her work illustrates the depth and maturity found in artists that have crafted their voice over a lifetime. She knows what it is to both mourn and then to live fully in the wake of death. She has watched the passing seasons eradicate what is perceived to be immutable. A lifelong companion, her art is “more alive now,” she says. It is an entity that breaths, dances, and speaks in a cryptic language that reveals its secrets slowly– mark by mark and brushstroke by brushstroke.
Creating art has carried her in love, loss, and across the wildly differing landscapes of the American South and Appalachians.
She grew up in the 1950s raising cows, candling eggs, and crossing creeks among the dense palmettos of a still-untamed Florida coast. She was influenced by the popular culture she saw in magazines, Andrew Wyeth, the post-Impressionists, and the narrative style of Norman Rockwell.
‘Tea Party’ | artist as a young girl
Working with her hands has rooted her creativity, and she continues to resist demarcations between craft and high art.
From a young age she threw herself into art classes and hoarded her lunch money for supplies. She continued to pursue her passion in college, landing at South Carolina’s Greenville Museum of Art, where she worked under Jeanet Dreskin, and was one of the first graduates from their fine art program in 1973. RKR would go on to achieve her BFA from the University of South Carolina.
‘Beached’ | Oil on Canvas
From there, RKR would live in towns and cities all across the south, and each would stamp an indelible mark on her style; the fragile petals of azaleas and the turquoise bay of Mobile informs her color choices; the snake-infested bayous of Baton Rouge ground her works in shadow; the dusty fields of rural South Carolina become negative space; violence–seeded in the underbelly of a Texas bar–is found in moments of dialectic tension that both fascinate and repel. The ancient Appalachians, where she settled and now lives, influences her sense of primitivism, and respect for traditional forms.
‘Rhythm & Blues’ | 2018
Outside of her studio, RKR also immersed herself in creation–whether it was a dress, a garden, a building, or doing needlework, carpentry, weaving, and pottery. She is especially influenced by Art Nouveau and William Morris, who wrote:
“If functionality is not similarly beautiful and elegant, it is not the solution.”
As a commercial designer she worked in oil-field mapping, pre-press, and from the mid-nineties onward managed her own graphic and web design business. Creation, to her, is about the wholeness of experience, the context, and the atmosphere. Where photography captures a moment, she feels art captures the evocative and sensory experience of that moment in absentia.
Her work illustrates the depth and maturity found in artists that have crafted their voice over a lifetime. She knows what it is to both mourn and then to live fully in the wake of death. She has watched the passing seasons eradicate what is perceived to be immutable. A lifelong companion, her art is “more alive now,” she says. It is an entity that breaths, dances, and speaks in a cryptic language that reveals its secrets slowly– mark by mark and brushstroke by brushstroke.