The Artist’s Way

Rosy Keyser’s work is not easy to define. With their layered surfaces and incorporation of different objects — sawdust, corrugated iron, charred wood — her large canvases land in a space between sculpture and painting. Her creations are big and bold and almost chaotic in their blending of different materials, energies and ideas. Keyser is an artist who embraces serendipity and sudden wonder, and she folds both deeply into what she makes.

 

“I think there’s something about necessity and invention that we don’t have so much anymore,” says the Form of 1993 alumna, who resides in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and teenage son. “We can just pick up our phones and get what we need. Which keeps us connected and is wonderful in a lot of different ways but I think it also takes away from our own personal agency to make something and have this deep moment of wonder.”

 

Not surprisingly, nature factors heavily into Keyser’s work. She grew up in northern Maryland, on a family farm not far from the Pennsylvania border. She had horses, dogs and chickens. There were farm chores, and she roamed the woods and nearby fields, swam in creeks and got her hands dirty in her parents’ big vegetable garden.

 

“We were told to go outside and stay outside,” Keyser recalls. “And playing in nature you have to be able to look at something and say ‘this can be that’ and to have a kind of imagination to create all these different worlds.”

 

If Keyser’s work straddles multiple forms and media, it might be because much of her life has as well. In parallel with her home life on the farm, Keyser went to school in Baltimore, where the cityscape offered a different and equally rich sensory experience. “There was the metal and a kind of hardness to it that I loved,” she says.

 

For Keyser, even at a young age, the making of art held the power to both explore new ideas and to heal. Just two days after her 13th birthday, her father died. His last gift to Keyser was a painting easel, and his passing, she says, set in motion a sustained curiosity about where energy goes when it moves and transforms.

 

“The idea of everything being dynamic and the belief that there is always potential for something moving to populate new forms and accommodate new ways of being — this has shaped my painting,” she says.

 

Keyser arrived at St. Paul’s as a Fourth Former in the fall of 1990. It was in Millville, she says, that the idea of becoming an artist and her sense of self firmly took shape. She remembers fondly nighttime astronomy classes taught by Walter Hawley and worked closely with art teachers Ian Torney and Colin Callahan, setting up her easel at different spots around campus to paint the surroundings and landscapes that were very much unlike what she’d known at home. Maybe most critically, Keyser took advantage of a Winter Term program her Sixth Form year that sent her to art school in Florence, Italy.

 

“It was an amazing experience, living in this apartment with other art students, improvising needs, sleeping on a couch and walking everywhere in that wonderous city,” she says. Upon returning to SPS, she did an exhibit at the Hargate Gallery. “That whole experience fueled this thing that I still have today of wanting to explore new settings that don’t necessarily feel comfortable. I feel that it’s really good for my work.”

 

Today, Keyser travels extensively — as do her paintings. Her work has shown in galleries around the world, including in Berlin and Istanbul. She’s taught art in Ethiopia and this autumn has a show scheduled at a gallery in Taipei City. This summer, she’ll undertake a 12-week residency at a retreat on the small Danish island of Læsø.

 

Her time there will be an important period for her. Keyser has spent a career untangling the world around her and broadcasting what she’s seen and felt on her canvases. In recent years, as the world has felt especially fraught, she’s tried to return to the simplicity and wonder that so defined her early art-making years in Maryland and at St. Paul’s.

 

“There’s a lot of expansive power and you can keep reinventing your language when you try to simplify,” she says. “By just taking in in your immediate surroundings and slowing down a bit. For me, there’s so much power in showing up and being present in the studio and I hope the people who like my work see that value.”