(gentle music) - My name is Dawn Rossbach and I am now a full-time artist and co-owner of a small gallery in Park Rapids.

(gentle music) Studio 176 started with friends of mine, Jeremy Simonson and Laura Grismore and Tiffany Beson was another person who started off the gallery with us.

And that was in August of 2019.

And then this year it seems to have taken off, you know, really nicely for us.

(gentle music) Sometimes when people come into the gallery and a lot of times there's an audible gasp like ah, wow, I didn't know this was here.

And they just, you know, you can just see them light up.

And I think that's, that's a really cool thing.

I've always been into art ever since I was little and took all the art classes in high school and kind of continued it.

But then, you know, my opportunities were not really there.

And when I was 34 I went back to school to college and I was gonna become an English teacher but then switched over to art.

And then after teaching for a bit it was like you know, I need to be doing this as well, working as an artist and teaching it.

Now I'm a full-time artist.

(gentle music) I think one of the things with teaching art is I always was learning right along with the kids.

There was, there was no doubt about it that I always wanted to learn new processes, new techniques, and share those with the kids.

But at the same time, you know I was growing right along with them.

So I don't really focus in on one thing.

And I think that I'm sure that comes from my teaching.

But my personal ones I'm probably in, mostly in painting printmaking and stained glass right now.

Some of the themes in my art are definitely food.

I have a series of of recipe prints that I call 'em.

It's recipes that are like ones from our family like my mom's spaghetti you know.

So then I create that visually, you know, and the coconut cream pie, chicken Caesar salad, her vegetable beef soup, you know, so those are all then visual recipes so to speak.

Some of the figures that I do are kind of these plump people.

So I've done quite a bit with figures but they're not, they're not cartoonish, but they're not super realistic either.

Oh, how can I forget the tree, the spirit tree, which is been a muse of mine for I'm not even sure how many years but it's a tree that's located on Highway 71 about five and a half miles south of Park Rapids.

And it's this lone white pine.

It sits very close to the highway.

It's just one of these landmark trees that everybody knows.

And so it became kind of my muse and I've done I don't know, probably 50, 60 versions of the one tree.

I do really really like oil painting.

And I just returned to that maybe a year ago or so.

Sometimes I will sit right down at the canvas with no intention and just start working with the paints and seeing what happens.

The, the reaction of the paint is really enjoyable.

And I can get really lost in that.

Stained glass as well.

How I got into stained glass is my dad did it first.

And then when he passed away I was the only one that could really take the equipment and the supplies because I was the only one that had room for it.

So then I just started creating my own works.

I called them the bevel made me do it.

They're abstract kind of pieces, panels.

What I'll do is I'll start with the actual bevel.

The reason it's called the bevel is because these edges are beveled down meaning add a slant on the edges.

I'll start there and then I'll work around that and I'll start selecting the glass.

Mostly I start working with colors that work together and then I'll throw in something that's got texture to it.

So I've got those components to make a really good composition.

And then from there I'll grind the pieces and then I will foil them and then solder them, then patina, and then polish.

And then it's pretty much ready to go.

But it's a long process, you know a small piece like four by 14 inches.

That's kind of the shape that I use a lot, probably gonna take eight to 10 hours total because there's much more technical process with the stained glass where you have to pay attention to what you're doing.

And same with printmaking.

There's a lot of similarities between those two in that they're both so technical and there's so many things that can go wrong.

(gentle music) So I've been doing print making for 30 years.

So I do linoleum blocks, I do etchings.

I do wood blocks, wood cuts, wood engravings, copper plate etchings.

I do mono prints.

There's a whole variety of, of print making methods under the guise of print making.

I think when I design one of the things that I go for especially with the block printing is I'll look at the composition and then contrast and then creating patterns.

So no matter what it is, but each print, success of print because you can do multiples of it is considered an an original print when they're hand pulled because the artist's hand is involved with it.

(gentle music) Ray Bradberry from Fahrenheit 451 has this quote and I know I won't get it right.

Create something so that your soul has a place to go when you die.

So I think for me it's kind of that little bit of creating something so then if it's in somebody's home, it's kind of there.

It's an honor to know that your work is good enough to be on their walls.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.