Keith Rosson

THE GUY:
Born in Ashdown, Arkansas. Formative years spent in the Pacific Northwest. Education at Cornish College of the Arts and Portland State University, with occasional residencies at the School of Hard Knocks. Involved with and passionate about punk rock for over half his life.
Legally blind, simply cannot drink liquor, bearer of plenty of bad tattoos, wholeheartedly believes that art can literally save one’s ass.

THE WORK:
Winged, mustachioed pickles that lament the dismantling of kindness in the world.
Fields of rabbits wearing gasmasks and germsuits.
Fathers and sons playing catch with human skulls.
Death wielding a sombrero and a forty-ounce. _
With a heavy nod to comic book culture and a cut-and-paste punk aesthetic, Keith Rosson’s paintings are simultaneously droll and incendiary; he tackles emotional, universal themes with a dark, tongue-in-cheek gallows humor. Bright, text-heavy and immediately recognizable, Rosson’s acrylic paintings often utilize secondary elements that include ink, correction fluid, bullets, teeth, nails, switchblades and cell phones and has led one critic to claim that, “(Rosson) continues putting out the finest graphic novels distilled into paintings in the Pacific Northwest.”

THE BLAH BLAH BLAH:
Keith Rosson has participated in nearly three dozen solo and group exhibitions in the past five years, including a solo exhibit at The Life Gallery in Portland, Oregon, inclusion in Washington DC’s Art Whino Gallery’s monthly roster of artists, and Insights, an annual juried group exhibition held in San Francisco’s City Hall. He was recently one of twelve Portland artists included in the art book Invision, published by Another Sky Press, and will have a solo exhibition at Art Whino Gallery in 2008. He is also a freelance illustrator/ designer, having done posters, shirts and record covers for bands such as Lucero, Against Me!. Don Caballero, Interpol, Hot Cross and more.___
Rosson is currently somewhere in the gallery, and possibly intoxicated. Feel free to chat him up about X-acto knives, fonts, bad tattoos, bottles versus cans, guitar picks and the creeping fear that things will, inevitably, end badly.

Selected Pieces

click thumbnail for a full-size view.

title card	all fears realized	anthems are commercials	survey says everything
who among us	tin soldiers