By Eleanor Skelton
in his studio space at TASI
For Stephen Rousset, painting has multiple layers of meaning. He delved deeper into his art during the initial coronavirus quarantine in spring 2020.
One of his larger works, a floor-to-ceiling painting with a spike piercing a brain and a hand surrounded by strands of DNA, combines a myriad of possible themes and interpretations.
Blood-red paint is spattered with gray around the image — violent but thoughtful.
“I’m a Christian, but I practice meditation,” Rousset said. “It can be frowned upon, but I think they’re cohesive in a way. So it’s meditation and prayer. A lot of people are like, that’s Jesus and Buddha — you can take it however you want it.”
Rousset said this painting has spiritual imagery, but is about challenging and changing your thoughts and approach to mindfulness.
“More like transforming your mind — a lobotomy of love,” he said. “A lot of times when people pray, they’re firing off so much. ‘I need this’ or ‘I need that.’
“Calm down, let’s think about what we actually want to say. But I’m not gonna preach to you or anything like that. I enjoy spirituality.”
Another one of his paintings is a mountain above an open hand with a tiny dot of light connecting them, all white lines on a black canvas.
“This one is directly (from) the mustard seed verse,” Rousset said. “The dot is the mustard seed moving the mountain.”
He said he has painted for a church before, which was “fun, but a little nerve-wracking.”
His paintings highlight a philosophical journey in balancing legalistic rules often associated with organized religion with personal spirituality and seeking peace and time to be mindful.
Rousset said his process is free-flowing and mostly stream-of-consciousness, whether he is painting or sculpting.
“I don’t really plan that much whenever I create, I just kind of go with it. I feel like that helps my creativity,” he said. “I do like anatomy.
“I like a lot of headless stuff. That’s the balance between the heart and the mind. Once you balance your heart and your mind, you’re headless. I just try to get weird with it.”
Rousett said he is mostly self-taught. As his style develops, he is diving further into surrealism.
Ancient civilizations, opening your mind to science and expanding consciousness are all sources of inspiration for him, along with C.S Lewis.
A quote from one of Lewis’ books “A Grief Observed,” stuck with Rossett after his father passed away: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
“There was like a hole, and I was trying to fill the hole,” he said, which influenced the metaphysical aspect to his work.
Another one of his paintings has a black-and-white world with hallmarks of ancient civilizations with a person in the middle looking up towards a multicolored collage of atoms and astronomy, a blending of science and creation myths.
“It’s the wonders of the world, like the ancient and the new,” Rousset said. “Man’s imagination is the final wonder. What man wonders about is transcendence or death. We’re told this is what it is or what it will be, but I think a lot of people wonder.”
“A lot of people asked, ‘Were you on drugs when you did this?’” he said. “I was not. Or people said, ‘This makes me feel like I want acid.’ I actually take that as a compliment. I appreciate that, but you’re not right?”
Sacred geometry is another influence on his work, Rousset said.
“That’s kind of what I was going for,” he said. “One drop in a limitless ocean, but what is the ocean but a multitude of drops — like we all affect each other.”
