The unexpected catalyst for Rosser’s recent return to painting was an accident that left him temporarily unable to continue making three-dimensional work. During a three-month recovery period, Rosser reflected on his past work and thought about where he wanted to go next artistically. “A lot of the earlier work, particularly the sculptural work, was layered and rather loaded with intellectually driven decision making,” says the artist. “I wanted the new painting to reflect a different attitude, to have a certain freshness.” In his initial return to painting, Rosser used oil paint and brushes, but these means proved unsatisfactory because he sensed they were taking him back to familiar artistic territory. “I felt the gestures the hand was making were rehashing a certain language that no longer felt appropriate. . . . It was almost like my hand was taking me back to what I knew and I wanted to go to a place that I didn’t know.”

To get to that unknown place, Rosser decided to adopt new materials and techniques, and along with them, to set on his practice certain limitations, which, in his view, “often create opportunity.” Instead of oil paint, which he found dried too slowly, presented health risks when used in quantity with turpentine, and was generally “too cumbersome,” Rosser adopted acrylic – a fast-drying, water-based medium he had not used for over twenty years. Instead of brushes, he decided to employ squeegees and trowels to move paint across the canvas surface, and to create forms through the use of masking tape and stencils. And instead of working on a canvas affixed to an easel or the wall, he decided to work on unstretched, unprimed canvas laid directly on the floor, just as he had in the late 1960s. Working on the floor not only provided a hard surface to permit the pulling of paint across the canvas with trowel and squeegee, but also gave Rosser, as it had Jackson Pollock some five decades earlier, the ability to work on the canvas from all four sides, and, in Pollock’s words, “literally be in the painting.”