Rozanne Hermelyn Di Silvestro is a visual artist working within the disciplines of painting and printmaking. Exposed very young to the arts through her mother, a fashion designer and master seamstress, Rozanne followed her passion for the arts throughout her youth. After studying art and design at UCLA and Art Center College of Design, Rozanne went on to form her own award-winning design firm in San Francisco. After more than two decades in the commercial art world, she pivoted her focus to express her own creative voice. A self-taught fine artist, she spent many years studying and exploring painting and printmaking, pushing beyond traditional techniques. Rozanne’s work reflects her knowledge of the visual message and is inspired by lived experiences and shared connections.
Awarded Best of Show and 1st place in numerous exhibitions, Rozanne’s work has been shown in Triton Museum of Art, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Sonoma County, Janet Turner Print Museum, The Art Complex Museum, Museum of Los Gatos, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the Library of Congress. Rozanne has also been published in Reed Magazine, California’s oldest literary journal and in The California Printmaker journal.
Artwork
“I believe art reflects life and life is messy. Life can be beautiful, and it can be ugly. I like to paint the ugly things beautifully to make people think, to show them a side of life that can be foreign. In both art and life, risks are meant to be taken, and rules are meant to be questioned, so I don’t view failures as mistakes, I see them as potential opportunities.
Oil painting is my first love, but I have a special romance with the monotype printmaking process. In essence, it is a painting on a plate matrix which is transferred to paper through an etching press. It is a continuous dance of adding and removing pigment to a smooth plate surface. The monotype print can only be produced once, so it straddles the fields of both printmaking and painting. The monotype is also a contradiction between light and darkness. I enjoy the struggle of finding life within the shadows. The technique promotes and inspires me to push realism to abstraction with expressive gestural strokes.
To create a monotype, my first step is to add oil ink with brushes and rollers onto a printing plate. Next, I remove the ink with my fingers, rags, sticks, anything really, depending on the type of mark I want to create. It’s an additive and subtractive process that I do repeatedly until I feel my image is complete. The final step is to transfer my image from the printing plate to paper through an etching press, creating a one-of-a-kind artwork.”