PUBLICATION CENTER

Meet Charlotte’s own Paul Rousso, who combines photography, wide-format printing on canvas, collages, and acrylic finger painting for one of the most unique art applications on the planet.

Armed with a Canon 5D and a wide-format printer, Paul Rousso became one dangerous artist. Rousso was already dangerous, with his own ripped, twisted, and torn version of art that was unlike anything else around.

“For years, I collaged on canvas. I would squeegee all this paper on canvas and once I got the composition I liked – like big crowd scenes torn from different newspapers and magazines – I would then varnish the heck out of it and overpaint the whole thing. This was my gallery and commission work for a long time,” explains Rousso.

Then, about five years ago, Rousso purchased a 64-in. printer and everything changed… Well, almost everything. Rousso’s collaged vision of people and places would continue, but the production method would shift from hand-torn collages to collages captured, rendered, and printed digitally.

Corporate Portraits

When a staffing company in Atlanta approached him with a commission for their annual report, Rousso recalls that he told them (paraphrasing, of course), “Hey! You’re in luck! I do these things really large. We can get a transparency shot, and you can use it for the cover of your annual report. And, if you pay me more money, you can own the original, which will look awesome in your office.”

“I realized that corporate portraits could be a product for me. Nothing really happened commercially until I came up the corporate portrait concept,” says Rousso.

Instead of making the typical canned presentation with his portfolio under one arm, Rousso comes armed with a full-size canvas print of his work, unrolls it on the table, and lets the size, scope, and sheer creativity sell the piece.

“I come in like a rug salesman with a big roll of canvas. The old cliché artist portfolio of ‘let me flick through some pages here’ just doesn’t cut it with these 20-foot pieces that are reduced down into a portfolio so you can’t see anything. If I can get in a room with a CEO who loves his company, I’ll close the sale,” says Rousso. “I started to get good at photography as well, and the digital world caught up with me in size and quality, which was important, because these things are huge. Now I can capture things where you can see the hairs in your eyebrows, if you want to, and I have a  machine that can put the image underneath, and give me an incredible base to work with.”

And that’s how Rousso’s canvas creations work. His digitally photographed collages are printed on LexJet’s Sunset Select Matte Canvas, and covered with a glaze of Golden’s medium varnish. Rousso then mixes paints to match the colors found in the corporate portrait, and smears the paint into the varnish.

"I look at the areas I plan to hit on that particular day and mix up a palette of all the variable colors. I dunk my finger in the varnish, smear a puddle on the canvas, then stick my finger in the paint and finger paint into that wet varnish. It’s made up of, for lack of a better term, these color-correct smears. I put down some paint and start pushing it around and smearing it and the colors begin to blend. Acrylic dries almost instantly, so you get a couple of chances to move it around for a second or two, and another second or two to wipe it off. Once it’s dry, that’s it,” explains Russo.

They say genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent luck, or something like that, and Rousso hit upon the winning process by literally hitting the canvas. “For years I tried to do this with other instruments; I varnished with brushes, for instance, and it just didn’t work. In anger I gave up, and smacked the canvas with my hand, and then I saw what I had been wanting to see all along. If you could stick your finger into your print and just kind of smear the color that’s there; that’s what I want it to look like,” he says.

Rousso prints almost all of his work, except when the project exceeds his printer’s size capabilities, such as a multi-piece mural he created for the Charlotte Bobcats’ arena. Those 15-foot-tall pieces were printed by a local company that runs 16-foot-wide billboard printers.

Rousso could see fear in their eyes when he asked to be involved in the printing process. They were expecting a temperamental artiste who would throw production into chaos. Instead, they found a knowledgeable and easy-to-work-with artist with loads of experience and skill in the printing process. The project went off without a hitch, and Rousso had his artwork in a very public place, sure to build more recognition and business.

“I’ve been waiting for this level of digital printing. About 12 years ago some salesman came to my studio and was trying to hawk a crummy version of the Epson – the dots were huge, and if you touched the print, it smeared. I rolled my eyes and just waited,” recalls Rousso. “The idea that years later I have this machine that far beats the pants off of what I was piddling around with then is amazing. For the canvas I print to, I tried a few places and I couldn’t believe they had the nerve to send me that stuff. Then I stumbled into LexJet, though you may have found me, and I started using Sunset Select Matte Canvas. It’s a wee bit more expensive, but it’s so much better that the price becomes irrelevant.”

Rousso’s latest digital and acrylic multi-media spark of genius involves rubbing the paper down to the ink so that only the ink remains in a flowing and undulating piece of acrylic. Rousso explains: “I’ve figured out a way to take a digital print and insert it into a slab of clear acrylic paint, minus the paper. It’s all about taking the ink from the print and being left with a slab of acrylic with the ink in it so you can sculpt it to make it look like a melted piece of glass. It can be really tricky. You take a gel medium, flatten out a glob of it, put a print face down into the gel, squeegee it, let it dry solid, and then come back and scrub away the paper.

"I’ve been using Epson matte paper because, of the photo papers I’ve experimented with so far, it’s worked best since it’s thinner and easier to rub away. You rub the paper down until it gets to a point where you can pull away pieces of the whole thing in one shot. It’s a very tedious process of rubbing away the paper by soaking it with water; it’s like the beer label you peel when you’re talking to a girl at the bar.

"Then you layer clear acrylic onto the back of that, add more until it’s as thick as needed, and paint the back white to emulate the white of the paper. Then you pull it up and the other side is a slick glassm-like acrylic image. I sculpt this and apply it to a wooden panel. Then you’ve got the print on this sheet of acrylic; it’s a flimsy, rubbery thing you can mess with. It takes gallons of acrylic to do anything of any size.”