Rosso Crimson: Exploring her practice and bespoke oil brushes

So she stripped everything and started to ‘paint these people as they are’, dressing the models in either plain white or black dresses and telling them to be themselves instead of posing in any specific way. She still stopped people in the street to ask to model for her, but she started noticing people who she thought had confidence or an attitude, who she knew would be comfortable in front of a camera. By stripping the set, she could really focus on capturing ‘a face, a memory, an encounter or a feeling’, leaving the background blank so she could really hone in on these aspects. This element of her process also led her to lean more into abstract patterns to fill the space left by the blank backgrounds. 

What sort of feelings do you want your audiences to feel through looking at what you paint? 

As soon as Rosso captures her model striking the pose that she resonates with the most, she will use it to set the tone of the entire painting. From the subsequent composition, patterns that she chooses to paint alongside the portrait, to the final title of the painting, she wants her audience to feel what that pose evoked in her at the time of the shoot. She aims to ‘make one moment universal’ through her work. 

However, Rosso tells me that she does not want this to happen every time, some paintings are more intimate, and she wants the feeling to be more individual. In this case, the titles become more abstract and generic to avoid the viewer connecting it to a specific feeling directed by her and instead inviting them to make their own conclusions. 

‘Connection is key, but I do not want to prescribe how you feel it.’

When she started painting, it was all about how she was feeling, using herself as a vessel and subject for the messages within her paintings. But she tells me that she thinks that no one person’s feelings are completely unique or special, so she started to move away from this and started to depict other people, wanting to take on more of a director’s role in her work. Rosso doesn’t want to use art to depict her own bad days or feelings and instead aims to preserve her practice as a safe space.

What is a key bit of advice you like to give artists who are just starting to learn to paint? 

Rosso’s main advice to anyone who is looking to learn about contemporary portraiture is that you must first learn to understand the basics of realistic portraiture. There are key concepts that you cannot bypass, and if you do end up trying to avoid them, you will end up forming bad habits that will not help with your practice in the long run. You have got to learn how to observe your subject (ie. the face) even before developing your technique – refining the observation skills will make the difference between you spending 10 years to master the technique or taking two. 

What do you prefer, online or in-person teaching? What are your favourite aspects of both? 

‘If you put them on a scale, they will always balance each other out.’

Rosso finds the value in both types of teaching, telling me that they complement each other well, and often those who have used online learning will come to one of her workshops later on in their learning journey. There is no one or the other, only advantages and disadvantages to both types of teaching. With online teaching, when it is recorded and uploaded to platforms such as her school platform, you can pause, replay and skip as much as you like, allowing you to revisit, recap or select content you want to focus on, freely. You can always pick up and down lessons easily, fitting them around daily life as well as you can, allowing any time pressures and commitments you have to be lifted. The main reason Rosso wanted to create her school was that it enables her to make full in-depth videos, where she talks through her techniques and creative processes.

What qualities about oil paints draw you to using them? 

Rosso loves the textures you can create with oil paint, they have an almost sculptural quality that other paints cannot achieve. She finds that acrylic paint dries very flat and plastic-like, failing to achieve the more attractive textural qualities that oil paint can create. Using them to add depth through sculpting elevates the tonal aspects of her pieces and often appears within the patterns of her backgrounds.

Can you give me an insight into the brushes you use the most when painting?

Rosso has tried a wide range of brushes throughout her art career, experimenting with various bristle types and shapes. However, originally, she mostly kept to using synthetic hair paint brushes throughout her practice, because she is a long-time vegan. She was using a lot of synthetic flat brushes, and as she developed a style that required using brushes that could create crisp edges, she started to see the limitations of synthetic paint brushes. She subsequently moved to using hog flat brushes and ‘the difference was immediate’, and started to experiment with painting with a range of different brands. Rosso eventually settled on using Pro Artes A Hog flat brushes, a brush perfect for creating defined edges and colour blocks with oil paints. 

Explore more about the differences between hog and synthetic brushes in our blog: Choosing Between Hog and Synthetic Paint Brushes. 

The hog hair filbert brushes in Rosso’s brush set also come in the same sizes and can help you with creating details. They enable you to create more sketchy and blocky brush strokes within your paintings, allowing for a wonderful balance of precision and expressive strokes. The filberts are also perfect for using with wet-on-wet techniques and indirect painting methods when working with oil paints.

There are also two synthetic brushes included in the Rosso Crimson brush set, made using a synthetic hair similar to sable. One is a small pointed round brush, and the other is a rigger brush, which are brushes that she uses to add the final details to her paintings, such as highlights in eyes. ‘Sometimes you get to the point where even a size one hog brush tip is too big, for those last details’, so selecting brushes with a synthetic bristle is key in helping you to achieve those final stages within your portraits.

‘You can create an entire portrait, start to finish, with the brushes that are in this set, without pushing for details too soon and without pushing the portrait into hyper-realism.’