Rose Belknap

Oil painting

I’ve lived on Vashon 50 years, after arriving on the island and immediately sensing that this place felt like home. I bought a house in Dockton and like everyone on Vashon, my husband Richard and I are still working on it. Art has been a lifelong passion. Having started drawing and painting from the age of 5 years old, I enrolled in Cornish College of the Arts and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

My earliest work focused on studies of color, refractive light and shape in still life and on interiors which allowed me to tell stories and suggest moods. My current work focuses on nature’s healing and uplifting beauty. Vashon reveals nature’s rhythm through its budding trees, many birds, dense woods and changing light, each offering inspiration. I enjoy the process of painting, it is like a meditation and I enjoy puzzling out how to render the natural world. The inherent glow of oil paints enlivens that process.