Interview with Rosina Bucci
On her first solo show and how it's never too late to start a passion.
Walking into the Leonardo da Vinci Centre last night, I heard the chatter coming from the second floor Piazzetta, where Rosina Bucci‘s first solo exhibit was being held. I also heard the muffled sound of… an accordion? I turned to my friend and smiled: we are in Saint-Leonard after all. Greeted at the door with some wine and a selection of finger foods, including my favourite spring rolls, we headed into the Piazzetta to meet the artist and her work.
Bucci loves colour. I didn’t ask her if she did, but I can tell from her paintings. Even the dark, rainy street paintings – done from pictures taken on her iPad through the windshield of her car (“Don’t worry, I wasn’t the one driving,” she explains) – show evidence of this. Colours pop under other colours, layers fade away to reveal more layers underneath. There is a depth and texture to these works. You’d think she owns hundreds of paint tubes, but she explained: “When you first start, you buy every colour – you have pink, three different shades of yellow – because you just don’t know. I only have five or six colours now” and she takes the time to mix each colour you see on the canvas.
She always loved art. But she said, “It just wasn’t something I thought I could do.” Until she started about ten years ago: “I took to it like a magnet.” She never took lessons, although she’s been working closely with other artists she defined as coaches, who take a more unstructured approach to teaching. Richard Morin, one of these teachers, helped her set up the exhibit at the LDV Centre.
The work on display is interspersed: there are some beach paintings from the beginning of her career, while her traffic scenes are more recent, but they’re not displayed in chronological order. Instead, she spoke of the hard mental work in curating her exhibit, thinking of colour, texture and size.
“I’m happy with my work. I’m happy where I’m at,” she told me, “but one always tries to push oneself.” Her studio is being built right now. In the meantime, she works within a community of artists. Working in that studio, she says, “energizes you. There’s a give and take of influence between artists.”
Bucci’s work is up at the Centre until October 29.
