Elena Rousseau

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Florentine Wing on Honey Calcite I, Front

Solve et Coagula, Front

Nothing Lasts but Art and Love, Front

Florentine Wing on Honey Calcite II, Back

The Florence Room, my studio, is a room dedicated to bringing spirit and matter together through the discipline of artistic endeavor and for the sake of pursuing an emergence of beauty that is as diverse and marvelous as each of us. My studio is a chapel of the arts, a space set apart for the creative process which often feels to me like the mixing of worlds. The Florence Room is where I live in that overlap of heaven and earth, where I write poetry, grind mineral pigments into pastes, mix marble plaster for use in fresco paintings, sculpt canvas with gesso, and embellish Italian giltwood artifacts with gold leaf, gems, and minerals. My artistic practice is a constant exercise in freedom, in which tight precision and unapologetic spontaneity bow to one another in turn. It is not uncommon for me to unmake things as often as I make them. This ritual of adding/removing, making/breaking, building/deconstructing is a reenactment of the passage of time and of what it means to be human, I think— excavating life for our truest selves, learning the art of transfiguration as we go, and bringing the world with us toward a unity that grows vast instead of diminishing. Welcome, all.

Artist Statement
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