Sue Rose is a self-taught glass mosaicist.
Her artistic expression dates to her childhood, when she would sneak off into the woods with a sketchbook to record her impressions of nature. Her mother, an accomplished portrait artist, taught Sue the proportions of the human face and figure; it was a natural progression for Sue to accept commissions for portraiture in her early teens. Above all, she loved sketching the natural world and painting animals and birds in pastel, selling them at art fairs.
Sue’s mosaic journey began in 2020 with the Covid pandemic, when she lost her previous business. Having become fascinated with birds, she began dreaming about bits and pieces of material coalescing into beautiful birds and flying away. These dreams pointed her to the library to find books about mosaic art. She decided to teach herself and began experimenting with tools, materials, and techniques. Today, mosaic is her full-time work.
Having attended the University of Illinois for Fine Art and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for Commercial Art, Sue worked some years in Chicago’s advertising production studios, before moving into marketing and public relations and winning an Addy award for her marketing campaign while running Sue Rose Graphics in Vero Beach, Florida. Corporate life caught her fancy when she worked for Frank N. Magid Associates as a promotion consultant to national TV and radio stations, banks, and hotels and designing print ads, logos, and finally storyboards for the NBC TV News in New York. Finally, family life took over her focus for decades, until Covid came along to radically change her focus back to art. “I’m very happy about that,” she says.
“Painting with glass”, as Sue describes her signature mosaic technique, resulted from injury to her dominant hand and arm after her first few mosaics, which threatened to end her mosaic career just as it had begun. After two surgeries and not willing to give up, she found alternative tools to cut glass, which led to her unique style.
A lifelong love of dance feeds Sue’s fascination with the portrayal of movement and grace through a rigid medium. She revels in choosing each small piece from a large sheet of glass, selecting just the pattern, texture, and color needed to convey the beauty she sees in her subject. Using curvilinear grout lines as an added design element, she breaks the boundaries of traditional mosaic technique, revealing a new look at an ancient art form.
Sue accepts commissions. Inquire at sue@suerosemosaic.com.