In The Abstract BAINBRIDGE PAINTER MERGES ART AND FASHION

BY GEORGE SOLTES

As an artist, CR Rousseau always thought big. At age 4, encouraged by grandparents who indulged her artistic ambitions, the budding painter took up her brush and transformed her bedroom wall into another world.

“I created a whole neighborhood,” she recalled. “A house with window boxes, a sidewalk that curved around, trees, clouds, kites and birds. I can still remember being so pleased. I didn’t think about the repercussions at all.”

Even the outsized dreams of that ambitious preschooler might not have been large enough to envision that one day her artwork would be displayed on a giant billboard in Times Square.

Raised in rural Auburn by her grandmother, an aerospace engineer, and her grandfather, the local sheriff, Rousseau was allowed to let her imagination run free, whether by painting or taking wire cutters to the old phones, flashlights, telegraphs and electrical transformers that were found around the house. Once in school, she could usually be found in the art room while the rest of the students were at lunch.

As an adult, Rousseau wore many hats, working in graphic design, marketing and real estate, doing communications for an environmental science company and dabbling in haute couture in the fashion house of renowned Seattle designer Luly Yang. Through it all, she never stopped feeling the pull to create her own art.

“Did I think I could ever leave the arts?” she mused. “I have left, but then I had to come back. Otherwise, I would fall into pieces. It’s like coming back to yourself.”

She designed greeting cards and found a niche painting California coastal landscapes, building a following in art galleries in the state. “I was able to produce and create meaningful things,” she said, “because those were places that I loved.”

Finally, in 2019, she took the plunge and became a full-time artist. By then, she had developed her own aesthetic, interpreting colorful West Coast landscapes through an abstract lens. Rousseau described her style as abstract expressionism, a genre known for its freewheeling approach and dramatic use of color. She compares her paintings to “the morning after a great dream, where you dreamt of a place, but can’t really feel the edges. It’s the emotional aftertaste of it.”

After plans to relocate to the south of France were sidetracked by the pandemic, Rousseau and husband Christopher moved to Bainbridge Island, where she settled into a sunny studio in the heart of the Bainbridge Creative District.

A chance conversation with a friend took her work in a completely new direction. Carson Lovett, just finishing the fashion program at Central Saint Martins school in London, invited her to virtually attend his graduation catwalk. While viewing the show, Rousseau had an epiphany. “I love fashion,” she said, “and I thought I would love to interpret what I feel and experience through abstract expressionism.”

She began a collaboration with Lovett and four other young designers with origins ranging from Sardinia to Hong Kong to Cameroon and visions just as diverse. Over the next five months, she spent long hours in the studio creating paintings inspired by each collection, building toward a four-day show at the 2023 New York Fashion Week. “It was like 21 hours a day,” she said. “I was literally going home to shower, sleep for 45 minutes and go back.”

Rousseau left for New York with paintings in tow and no clue what people would make of her idea. She needn’t have worried. “The Art of Couture” was a sensation. Over 500 guests from around the world visited the show and Time Out New York named it one of the “top 10 NYFW events you can actually attend.” The experience culminated with a rotating display of her work on a massive digital board above the runway in Times Square.

How does Rousseau plan to follow up? With an extreme reduction in scale and much closer to home. Her next exhibit, “Postcards,” showing at Blackbird Bakery this January or February, will feature miniature California landscapes, some painted with tiny four-hair brushes, that she hopes will provide “a little baby escape” from the dark Bainbridge winter.

“It’s kind of cheeky but also really fun,” she said, “And if I’m not having fun, what am I doing?”