Michael Rossiter is an up and coming Australian contemporary artist with a focus on original oil on canvas paintings.
Michael was born in England in late 1974, shortly after his birth his parents (English father and Australian mother) decided to move back to Sydney, Australia, where they had met a few years earlier, to raise their family on Sydney’s idillic northern beaches.
Michael Rossiter has loved drawing for as long as he can remember and showed great creativity early on in his academic life. His school teachers, noticing his talents for visual art as early as age 10, nurtured this talent by asking Michael to illustrate the school annuals and a cookbook. Michael also painted backdrops for the yearly school theatre production.
In the years after leaving high school Michael continued to develop his artistic skills, when not earning a living, both visually and musically, aside from a passion for paintings his love of electronic music made him gravitate toward DJing and more recently he taught himself electronic music production using advanced software including Ableton’s Live and Propellerhead’s Reason.
Michael's painting style is very unique, some would even say strange, quirky, surreal, dreamlike and whimsical. He has been likened to Salvador Dali because of some of the more surreal aspects of his paintings. He has an eye for detail, fine lines and colour. Many of his paintings include cloud formations and trees, which came from being inspired by his surrounds in the picturesque Blue Mountains, and his paintings always contain an element of life - worldly or other worldly.
After many years of sketching, pen and ink and watercolour, Michael decided in 2003 to try his hand at oil on canvas paintings and has never looked back, preferring oil on canvas for its depth of colour, workability and vibrant finish. His passion for oil on canvas painting saw him produce a collection of paintings over the next couple of years readying him for his debut solo exhibition “Never a Dull Moment” in 2006. This exhibition was held at The Artists Gallery in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Michael’s paintings were extremely well received, not only selling paintings prior to the official opening of the show, but going on to sell half of the paintings exhibited and being approached for commissioned paintings by local businesses and individuals.
In 2007 Michael was awarded the inaugural Blackheath Art Prize for his painting “Dusk” which was judged by Christine Morrow, curator of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Christine Morrow also awarded a Highly Commended for his painting “Winter Magic” in the same exhibition.
In 2008 Michael was awarded 2nd place and People’s Choice for his painting “Twilight” at a Members Only Exhibition at the Blackheath Art Society. Later that year Michael held his second solo exhibition "Nightscapes and Nonsense" at the Hat Hill Gallery, Blackheath, Australia. Another well received exhibition and a beautiful collection of surreal, whimsical paintings.
Michael lives and works in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia with his wife and two young children, and is currently working on a new collection of contemporary paintings with plans to exhibit this collection of work in Sydney, Australia in 2012.