ROSE ROSENDO DESERT SUN ARTICLE

Rose Rosendo: Sculpting Myths in Cement Rosalie MurphyThe Desert Sun Published June 2, 2015 Before Rose Rosendo starts putting a piece of artwork together, she assembles a little library — a folder full of magazine clippings, annotated pieces of literature and color keys. Early in the gathering process, she creates a title. Then, every time she unearths something related, it slips into the file. Months or sometimes years later, Rosendo opens the folder and begins laying out a collage or sketching a sculpture. Her work is full of symbols and allusions to literature and myth, but each one of the references is deliberate. She plans and executes meticulously. "This (art) is to help people understand their potentiality, their spiritual potentiality, in their lives, for themselves, not for me," Rosendo said. "I mean, I work at it. I meditate, I read books... I guess there's been a spiritual part of me for a long time."Rosendo, 74, spent most of her life in in Orange County. She studied sociology and psychology in college, then spent decades conducting vocational tests for the Veterans' Administration. For most of her adult life, Rosendo practiced printmaking as a hobby and showed her work at Laguna Beach art festivals. She learned how to weld. On the side, she flipped houses. By the time she retired, she was eager to do art full time. "When I got down here, I decided I was going to dedicate my whole life to this," Rosendo said, gesturing around her garage-turned-studio. "I set up the studio and went to work." That was in 2000. Since then she has created a number of sculptures in steel and cement and mixed-media collages using oil. acrylic and ink and has shown them throughout California. Her collages, at first glance, look like paintings, at least three feet square on museum board. Up close, however, layers appear — in one piece, silhouetted mountains are painted in acrylic on paper and glued in place. A earthy desert painted in fluid brush strokes lies on top of them in the foreground. The topmost layer is a stylized outline of a man in bright green ink. Another collage depicts a woman with a halo of turtles. In a third, a woman sits before a cactus beside a tiger and a snake. "Nuestra Senora de los Nopales," it's titled — "Our Lady of the Cacti." "That's why my paintings have animals in them — it's a representation of our connection with our brothers and cousins and sisters of the animal world," Rosendo said. "And also, the figures are see-through. We are connected to each other, and to the Earth." Rosendo's sculptures, while rich with symbolism, are bulky and brazen. She welds steel frames and surrounds them in cement, which she coats in vivid dye that, she said, can last outdoors for a century. Some take the shapes of reindeer, eggs and crosses while others are of humans. Most weigh at least 100 pounds. Even so, Rosendo still transports all of them in the back of her van. One sculpture, an installation she imagines for a place of worship, has taken her years of tinkering to finish. Rosendo imagines a labyrinth where visitors encounter three sculptures — one representing departure, one for initiation and one for return, the steps in "the hero's journey" codified by literature scholar Joseph Campbell. "We need ritual in our lives, and in our culture we have very few. We have baptism, marriage, funerals, confirmation, Bar Mitzvahs. Otherwise, we don't (have many)," Rosendo said. "And our culture is so caught up in the material that we need to touch base with why our soul is telling us what we need to do." If this all sounds a little too mystical know that Rosendo is a voracious researcher. Every piece comes with a detailed write-up, with sources cited, explaining the work's allusions and Rosendo's intended message. The level of study and imagination that goes into each piece is a reflection of her passion for creating art. Rosendo also asks spiritual leaders to direct her. A deacon at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, for example, guided Rosendo through that church's labyrinth before she started her own design. Rosendo no longer practices Catholicism, the faith in which she was raised, but continues to meditate daily. She hopes her artwork can connect viewers to the same introspection and self-awareness that meditation brings her life. "One thing that meditation or these kind of rituals do for us is help us control our mind, so we can worry about what's important, and not what kind of car we drive. It gets rid of that," Rosendo said. "It makes us have much more humility and respect for ourselves." For all the academic effort that goes into each piece of art Rosendo creates — dozens of magazine clippings, pages of her own writing, hours of thinking and sketching and meditating — she still sees herself as a a student. She has no formal art training except in welding, and since she primarily welds frames for cement sculptures, most viewers never see that handiwork. But she is confident that her pieces carry vital messages to their viewers. And she said she enjoys making art even more now, at 74, than she did when she was younger. Rosendo leans on her four-footed cane as she switches on a string of Christmas lights, which form a halo around a large cement head with bright green curls molded into the crown. She calls this sculpture the "mistress of chaos." "We are in a period of chaos, I think, because we're changing — the information age, we're going into a new age here, and when that happens, there's a lot of apprehension and fear and, 'what am I going to do, how's this going to work?'," Rosendo said. "You don't quite know what's happening until you get there." Rosalie Murphy covers business and real estate at The Desert Sun. Reach her at rosalie.murphy@desertsun.com or on Twitter @rozmurph. Readers can view Rosendo's work at http://artistrosendo.blogspot.com/ and reach her at 760-408-0007.

ARTIST ROSENDO VIDEO

 

Published June2m 2015