Armenda Rosette Knipp

Painter. Visionary. Storyteller

Rosette was born in rural northeast Louisiana to parents who encouraged ingenuity and resourcefulness in their children. She found herself immersed in color and design from an early age. Her father, a house painter and building contractor, brought home color sample books provided to tradespeople by the major paint companies, such as Sherwin Williams Paint Co. These books had a fan-shaped cutout like a splayed peacock’s tail, that allowed the viewer to see several colors juxtaposed against each other. She enjoyed leafing through the color sample books and studying the colors and how they looked next to each other. She liked to watch her father, mixing oil paints in his white painter’s overalls, the scents of oil paint and paint thinner in the air. She remembers “feeling” the creaminess of the colors her father mixed, and now as an adult, admits that color has a visceral affect on her.

Sometimes Rosette’s father brought home blueprints of homes he was building or remodeling, and allowed her to carefully look through them. She liked to trace her finger through the rooms, delineated by white lines on the blue paper. She was drawn to the texture of the paper and it’s rich blue color. Her imagination bloomed. She begin to develop a strong sense of design and space. Her love of color deepened. The white grid-like lines in the blueprints would one day find their way into her colorful paintings, as would the circular shape of the paint can lids, lying about as her father mixed paint colors.

She began painting in her early twenties, taking oil painting classes and workshops, both studio and plein-air, as well as drawing classes at a museum in a nearby city. She attended numerous workshops taught by internationally known Louisiana artist, Don Cincone, before studying under him privately for a number of years. Cincone was a mentor to her and played a very important role in Rosette finding her own direction with her art.

Rosette is an intuitive artist, as well as an intuitive colorist with a strong sense of composition. The inspiration for her artwork comes from what she calls “fragments of inner knowing”. This “inner knowing” lead to the inception of her “Vessel Paintings”, incorporating large pots, bowls and urns - often with roots and vines growing in them, beneath them, around them or coming out of them. They often depict the “connectiveness” of nature. Certain symbols appear again and again in Rosette’s work. She states that it is for the viewer to discern what the symbols mean to them, personally. She considers herself a visual storyteller and invites the viewer to participate in the narrative.

Rosette’s fanciful, colorful paintings can be found in homes from New York to Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas. Her work has been included in many regional, national and international art shows. Her home and studio are now based in Granbury, Texas