Well over a decade working in texture design and photography taught me that color is only one part of what gives a piece its feeling.

Rosarium Strata brings together my love of opulent texture, florals, and color. Each palette reveals the logic behind a finished piece in how everything can feel gloriously alive without losing its structure. I admit it also makes me want to chew on it with my eyeballs, if that is even a thing.

I wanted this to be the language where I work out the logic of each piece and their technical aspects, what I already know through material. I know how paint is supposed to move beneath a brush or palette knife, how it gathers, folds, drags, resists, and catches the light. The work is not about inventing that behavior from nothing but rather finding a language capable of carrying the physical knowledge I have built through years of creating.

Rosarium Strata grew from a practice I had been building since 2013, bridging the gap between traditional and digital art. Long before generative artificial intelligence, I was using programs such as Procreate and Adobe, and GIMP, and even Paint Shop Pro at the tender age of 10 (anyone remember that one?) before both of those, alongside painting, collage, texture, photography, illustration, and physical material studies to preserve the evidence of the hand while expanding what the digital environment could hold. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to bring traditional materials into my digital work. I would paint individual lines, brushstrokes, watercolor marks, and textures by hand, photograph them, scan them with my Epson printer, clean them up in Photoshop, and then bring them into Procreate to use inside paintings that I was also building by hand. Sometimes I would make hundreds of marks just to find the right one. Then I would scan all of it and spend even more time cutting things out, adjusting the color, layering them, and painting over them until they felt like part of the same image.

It was a very slow process of paint the thing, photograph the thing, scan the thing, edit the thing, and then use it to paint another thing. I was constantly moving back and forth between physical and digital tools because I wanted digital paintings to still carry the mess, movement, and texture of something made by hand. In 2017, Belliaroze was born, and I would go on to create textures for commercial use that maintained the authenticity of being hand painted.

I have always been fascinated by translation. A painted surface can become a digital texture, a photograph can become a structural reference, and neither one of those things are the finished piece. Each process leaves information behind and Rosarium Strata emerged from learning how to recognize that information, carry it across formats, and build a coherent visual language from it.

I spent years building my own digital material library by scanning hundreds of individual brushstrokes, painted marks, paper surfaces, found textures, photographing nature and fragments of physical media. I was learning how materials behave, how they carry movement, and how their physical structure could be translated into a digital space without losing the evidence of how they were made.

Rosarium Strata is therefore both an artistic practice and an ongoing inquiry into what becomes possible when creativity is treated as a form of communication between different kinds of interfaces. It asks how an idea moves from instinct into language, from language into structure, from structure into image due to the visual logic that is behind traditional process.