Her canvases are alive with saturated, vivid colours, as glamorous and dynamic as the artist herself. “I could no more paint a bleak, dull picture than I could fly to the moon,” she says. “Anyone with an African upbringing will tell you the same: African art is so bright. I used to come over here on holidays, go to galleries, and be amazed at the lack of colour.” Rozanne’s Scottish father and Yorkshire mother moved to Zimbabwe before she was born in 1962. She lived there for the first 40 years of her life until the political situation under President Robert Mugabe saw her flee the country with her five young children, taking only what they stood up in.
“I took the children to school one day, and never got to go home again. I lost everything, including – for me the biggest tragedy – all my art materials and books. But please don’t think I’m sorry for myself – that’s not me at all! It’s just the way things were.” Rozanne and her children pitched up back in the UK, followed later by her husband and parents, and she settled at Sturminster Newton in Dorset, setting up a studio in nearby Shillingstone. Despite having had a successful career as an artist in Zimbabwe, she was forced to start again completely from scratch, seeking out frames for her paintings at car boot sales and selling her work round local pubs.
“So that was my two years of crying into my paints!” she says. “Then someone spotted my work, liked it, and got me into a local gallery. My big break was with my pictures of harbours, which I started painting after visiting Padstow and Rock in Cornwall. “I like to use lots of different media – I have a real love of calligraphy, for example. And my paintings are created using layers and layers of paint, sometimes four or more.” Rozanne is keen that each and every work she creates is unique and isn’t reproduced. “I’m ever conscious of those who like and buy my work,” she says. “I haven’t succumbed to the temptations of limited editions or mass market prints. Each picture I paint is an original, with no one painting being the same as another.”
“I am also passionate that my work remains affordable. I would rather sell ten paintings to ten nice people at a good price, than one at a fortune to a celebrity. I’m not interested in the ego of art! It bores me to death.” Rozanne is best known for her vivid animals, many of them, most obviously her dramatic elephants, inspired by her African youth; for flamboyant birds; for those harbours; for flowers and for street scenes, all of which lend themselves perfectly to her glorious palette of colours and her trademark metallic embellishments. But recently she has turned her attention to a subject less renowned for its colourful appearance – her mother’s home county of Yorkshire.
She’s created a stunning image of Beverley market place especially for the Artmarket Gallery. And typically, she’s managed to inject her trademark colour into the town’s grey stone buildings: they’re streaked by the luscious hues of an East Yorkshire sunset. “I just love Yorkshire – I’m actually a little obsessed with it,” she admits. Who knows – perhaps the county, so far removed from those pulsing African colours, could become her next muse?
She’s created a stunning image of Beverley market place especially for the Artmarket Gallery. And typically, she’s managed to inject her trademark colour into the town’s grey stone buildings: they’re streaked by the luscious hues of an East Yorkshire sunset. “I just love Yorkshire – I’m actually a little obsessed with it,” she admits. Who knows – perhaps the county, so far removed from those pulsing African colours, could become her next muse?