My Life in Color
by Carol Damian

In her dynamic and monumental paintings, Rosario Rivera-Bond has established a course of action with spontaneous and energetic brushwork and dramatic color effects that have become her personal means of expression as she addresses and confronts the world around her. It is an activist approach to making art that is not necessarily political, but certainly responsive to issues that especially affect women and the environment and that she has observed and made part of her artistic direction and philosophy. Not surprisingly, such a path has taken her beyond painting to the inclusion of a variety of things, collaged passages within or on top of the paint’s application, to the making of objects that incorporate the same sense of creativity and aesthetic presence. Always with an eye toward issues of popular culture, Ms. Rivera-Bond is as much a translator as she is an artist, using paint and a variety of other materials to deliver a personal message and raise awareness.
The paintings are created in series, although she is quick to explain that she works spontaneously without a distinct plan and the series seem to materialize independently as she works through each one, constantly developing her ideas and bringing them to fruition. Ideas emerge from the paint to introduce the next image, or inspire her to move in a completely different direction and begin another work, that may also result in a new series. Her creative process is as spontaneous as the works appear with fluid brushwork that ranges from subtle to brash, markings that resemble the calligraphic as much as the accidents of graffiti, and loose washes of color over unprimed canvas for unpremeditated effects. The works are dominated by an “open-form,” all-over field of color or mass of free, interpenetrating strokes, lines, or shapes. Like the New York Action Painters of the mid-20th century, Ms. Rivera-Bond has adopted a gestural, painterly manner that is as improvisational as it is carefully considered as a process. She also works to give primacy to content, believing that if her feeling and execution were sincere, the form would prove expressive and reveal the subject that inspired her, or came to be–perhaps this occurs simultaneously. It is this open-ended attitude that results in works of deep personal meaning and a genuinely personal style. A visit with the artist in her studio quickly reveals her personality and the inspiration for her work that can be found in the objects she collects, and her savy shopping sense that is present in her fashionable character and is imbedded in her creativity, especially in the recycled objects that are accumulations of “junk,” and informed by a fashionista sensibility–sequins, beads, purses, shoes, feathers, fabrics, hats, etc., etc. Strange creations are “dressed” and take on the role of the fantastic participant on a celebrity runway.
No doubt this creativity derives from a very personal outlook and everything that she does compliments and/or informs each other. This sense of using accumulation to build conceptually and aesthetically is key to the success of her painting series that move beyond abstract brushwork to create different surface textures and spatial constructs.
The paintings begin with loose spontaneous brushwork where layers of color and linear markings are resolved to create an ambiguity of content. Representational images emerge and often appear paradoxical in works dominated by abstractly expressive and gestural processes. Occasionally figures are fragmented and reassembled into collage-like compositions of autonomous arrangements that are at once sensuous and distressed, and always dominated by the energetic application of color in all its glory. Color dominates in Rivera-Bond’s work and is the beginning and end of her technique and artistic practice. The colors are not arbitrary but come from within as expressions and responses to daily concerns and realities. She uses her choice of colors while allowing the paint to show itself as paint, with layers of different saturations, drips, stains, diluted and undiluted pigments in overall applications on the surface of the canvas. Sometimes the color is thickly applied, over and over, and other times is revealed as washes of delicacy. Always, the application is expressive and according to mood. Originally primed in a luminous white or left as a raw background, the canvas permits the colors’ purity to reveal itself and speak its own language within its natural surface. Like controlled accidents, the colors reflect a sensitive and personal response reflecting a linear grace amidst the gestural.
The choice of color is purely emotional and a reflection of her personality and interests. Especially important are her images of women, found in many of her series and ranging from friends to celebrities to generic personalities doing what women do: talk, shop, dress, enjoy, muse, and collect things from many sources, trash to treasures. It becomes a summation of her ideas about life. The addition of a variety of things–fabric, beads, bling, paper, etc.–most of them recycled, serves to energize the composition and the subject. It is an inventory that includes personal and found items, often redolent of nostalgia, or chosen for their interesting shapes, materials and references. Whatever her reason, it is their placement on the canvas that contributes to the compositional effect and meaning present in each work that invites personal interpretation beyond what may have originated in the artist’s inspiration.

DAMIAN, Carol et al. Rosario Rivera-Bond. My Life in Color. Colombia: Global Print Services, 2023, pp. 5-6.