STEPHEN ROSSER

"My art is an extension of my thinking," states Stephen Rosser. "Many of my paintings have a humorous quality that comes about by twisting traditional ideas into unexpected forms. I use puns literally as well as visually. There is a wealth of material for the painter in the subculture of the contemporary American cowboy lost in a modern world. My Shaman paintings, on the other hand, are very serious."

Rosser's art seems to have followed the same lines as his life, from the serious business of pursuing oil painting, to the freedom of working as a cowboy.

"My earliest memory of an artist is Rembrandt," recalls Rosser. "As a very small child, I saw his painting The Syndics of the Cloth Guild on the inside lid of a cigar box. I was astonished that a person could make a picture like that using paints and a brush." That, he decided, was what he would like to do.

After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Education from Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Rosser held a variety of jobs before going to graduate school at the University of Tulsa. While finishing his Master's thesis, he returned to the family ranch, where he spent his days herding cattle, and his nights painting and doing research for his thesis. "Being a cowboy," he says, "offers many freedoms, with which few jobs can compete. There is great satisfaction in being outside on horseback checking cattle." There was, however, even greater satisfaction for Rosser in painting.

Rosser began painting subjects that related to his rural environment, and after becoming interested in the architecture of religious structures, incorporated the rural subjects into the basic floor plans of the holy places. About the same time, Rosser became intrigued with Swiss Psychologist Carl G. Jung's ideas concerning the collective unconscious and archetypes. The result was the beginning of The Masked Shaman Series, which Rosser describes as "a personal, internal search for archetypal images from within the collective unconscious. I arrive at the paintings by studying various primitive cultures and attempt to remove all of the cultural connotations, examining the culture's artifacts on a purely visual basis."

When Rosser showed his series to the chairman of the Art Department at the University of Tulsa, the chairman was so taken with it, that he paid Rosser the highest compliment possible: he bought one of his paintings. The Shaman series, however, began to drain Rosser mentally. He explains, "The images were very serious and consuming. I needed to start a second series, so I returned to my sketchbooks and found dozens of drawings of cowboys and other rural-related renderings. Thus, the second series was born: The Cowboy and Indian Wild West Series. Someone once called this second series 'comic relief,' and that describes its function pretty well. The heavy seriousness of the Shaman is countered by the lightheartedness of the cowboys. While both series share the same stylistic direction, the intellectual sources are very different. The Masked Shaman Series comes from within; it is an attempt to make visible that which has never been seen. The Cowboy and Indian Wild West Series comes from outside myself; they are literal, completely external images."