Commissions Open!
Looking for a custom oil painting or unique piece tailored to your space? Riley is currently accepting commissions. Whether inspired by mossy forest floors, flora and fungi, or personal visions, reach out to collaborate on a custom original.
Artwork
About
Riley Rosser is a Seattle based artist, singer and song writer. Inspired by jungle environments, plant life, and fungi, this artwork examines the delicate balance between life and death. By focusing on natural cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, the work highlights nature’s quiet resilience and the interconnectedness of all living things. I am a self-taught artist based in the PNW and I primarily work with oils. The ever-turning beauty of the natural world as one, incessantly sprouting, growing, blooming, birthing, wilting, decaying, and folding back into itself, is what fuels my creative impulse. I find something so obviously divine about the observable intricacies of life which surround us, and the creation of art I might even call an act of worship. What is a ray of light kissing through the flesh of poppies if not pure magic? Why do molecules obey physical laws so that cells erupt into species of dazzling color and form? Why does life proliferate at all, both fierce and blameless in its will? And further, why are we so blessed that we possess both the senses and the mindfulness to behold the miraculous way of things? I’ll never answer these questions, but I will spend my lifetime bent at the easel, toiling to express the cavernous gratitude I have for such conditions.
And, in my art I find myself always coming back to motifs of dark portals; empty holes which might wormhole to another realm, pupils and irises, orbs of blinding light, heavenly clouds and skies and moons, planets, moths and butterflies, fungus, and of course, glorious plants. The best I can do to explain myself would be to suppose that these subjects amalgamate into an embrace of not only the beauty of life and its necessary brevity, but also the mystery that lies between death and rebirth. I think there is something like god connecting the dog shit to the fungus that converts into a fuzz; to the tree root that might slurp down that fuzz like a tasty treat. I know there is science for this stuff but that just doesn’t seem like a proper response to the profundity! Praise! Exalt!