Photo by Cyprien Leym
Living Inside the Lines
By Kim Smith
Walking inside Rose Masterpol’s art studio in downtown LA, I feel as though I’ve stepped into the canvas of one of her abstract paintings. The colors and shapes take on a life of their own. Shelby, her Rhodesian Ridgeback, comes bounding out from behind a drawn curtain, followed by Masterpol’s dog. She leads me around an L-shaped wooden barrier that stands so that her stacks of paintings can lean comfortably. “If you say you’re a painter, you’ve got to be painting.”
Rose Masterpol has been painting since 1989 and has emerged as a talented Abstract Expressionist painter. She has been commissioned and collected by Robert Gore Rifkind (of LACMA’s Rifkind Foundation), Sela Ward and Jane Lynch, to name a few. She has had numerous exhibitions including Hollywood Bowl Frank Gehry Art Project at Bergamot Station, Palm Springs Museum and The Whole 9 Gallery in LA. In a couple of hours, she has an opening at Brea Art Gallery, For Love or Money, and is hoping to sell a few paintings. Fortunately, being a graphic designer by day (she’s a graduate of CalArts) allows her the freedom to do what she’s meant to do – paint.
I recognize her 2007 Neutral Ground painting on the far red brick wall. It’s architectural genius. Flying above, looking down, the shapes and colors invite you in to interpretation. “I live my life structurally. Everything is a shape. Instead of taking a picture or painting a table, I go way in or way out. I don’t want to show you what to see. And I love that.” I look around the room for Emancipation. Its rectangles reach as if yawning, the circles conspire.
Within the shapes of her paintings, Rose Masterpol has discovered freedom. Supported by former art teachers, she was encouraged to follow her creative talent. Painting turned out to be her saving grace in a world with rules. “No one is telling me how to do it, when to do it and why. It’s my ultimate freedom on this planet.”
I follow NY-born Rose Masterpol into the space where she works. Her latest painting rests against a stack of others. My curiosity of what lies behind is killed by the boldness of the image. The color black is indefatigable. The magnification of her signature shapes is a change for Masterpol. “I’m trying to get into doing simple and not so intricate. I want to expand, open up, but bring in the black to create striking, powerful paintings.”
Tori Amos’s new CD, Abnormally Attracted to Sin, helped to seduce the black onto the canvas. Music plays an important role in her creative process. With a brush in hand, the music of Buddha Bar helps to mix the acrylic colors to match her emotions. It opens her up on an audio journey as well as the physical. For Rose Masterpol, it’s more than painting. “When I work, I’m not working from a sketch, an idea, a photograph. It’s an emotional space I get into and the music drives that. I chase the colors and watch it come alive.” For more information: www.masterpol.com
