Rosa Sepple was born in London of Italian / British parentage. She lived, for many of her early years, in Venice with her Italian grandfather, renowned artist, Salvatore Casagrande. Following in the footsteps of her grandfather, Rosa started her career as an artist in the late ninties, producing exciting, vibrant and highly original paintings in watercolour and collage.

 

Rosa was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colour in 2004 and as a member of the Society of Women Artists in 2009. She has private collectors worldwide and has exhibited in most of the major art exhibitions, including the Royal Academy in London. Rosa also has regular shows in fine art galleries throughout the UK.

 

Recent awards have included The Herring Award for 'Best Figurative', The Elizabeth Scott-Moore Award, The Debra Manifold Award, The Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Award, The Andrew Hillier Award for 'Creativity' and two Daler-Rowney Awards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

QUOTES

"... great art is the result of inspiration, imagination, creativity and an abundance of skills, combined with that rarest of attributes - natural talent. In Rosa Sepple's work we see all of these.."
- Andrew Hillier, 2008

 

"Rosa continues to produce highly original works that are vibrant, energetic and magical. The paintings possess a rare combination of opposites; innocence and sophistication, reality and distortion, actuality and fantasy. The painting process also embodies diverse actions. An initial drawing stage, a time when the painting is allowed to take over to do what it will, when any action taken is loose and spontaneous, a time when attack is required, scraping back, painting over and sometimes "crossing fingers". Compositions are another important factor. These are daring and, at times, deliberately awkward and quirky giving  a unique character to the subject whether this be an image of Venice or a troupe of saucy dancing girls."
- Colin Kent RI, 2007

 

"The joy that we now take in her painting comes out of this brilliant combination of irreverent playfulness with her now highly developed formal composition skills. Yes we have distortion and elongation, an abandonment of perspective, a disregard for scale and, to say the least, a most unusual and eclectic use of mediums and materials, but they all work now within the framework of beautifully balanced constructions of colour and form. Her pictures are crafted and honed, painted and repainted until they are right, without ever losing the illusion of spontaneity and playfulness. There is cleverness here, an ability to make difficult things look easy and in a sense it is this apparent childlike ease that gives her paintings so much of their appeal. There is that feeling, as we see in Lowry as well, that we could almost have done them ourselves, until we try that is. Only then do we appreciate the mastery and care that goes into the making of the picture"

- John Gilboy, 2008