Making Art History - Vanessa Francoise Rothe

Once a successful Art Director and Graphic Designer working with Disney Press, Walter Foster and Sony, Vanessa Francoise Rothe turned to amore traditional color palette as a professional fine artist, fine art magazine editor, curator, lecturer, gallery owner, and art dealer. Vanessa Françoise Rothe grew up in the artists colony of Laguna Beach, CA, the daughter to a well known German clothing designer to the Stars, Detlev Rothe, and her French mother a model, Jacqueline Ricaud. She would come home from school to find Ron Wood or Kenny Loggins in her living room playing guitar with her father, and was soon painting on silk to make custom jackets for the Rolling Stones with their iconic lips logo. She was constantly surrounded by fashion, fine art, books, and music and was, like many successful creatives, already drawing and designing at a young age.

After winning many youth art competitions and 1st place in the senior art contest at Laguna Beach High School. Rothe received top scholarships for her university studies and honored in both Business/Marketing and French Literature at the University of San Diego and the University of CA, Irvine. She helped design, write, and do illustrations for the yearbooks both in high school and was Art Director for yearbooks in college. With this publications experience and being on eof the first proficient designers on the Apple Macintosh computer in the late 80’s, Rothe was whisked away to live six years in Switzerland working as graphic designer in various advertising and print publication firms, fashion modeling, playing professional volleyball indoors, and on the beaches of Italy, Turkey and South Africa. While in Europe she had the chance to visit almost every art museum, tour all the famous cities and towns with their architectural splendor, and learned three new full languages while there. Later as an art director back in Southern California for Walter Foster Publishing she created over 40 new books for the company working with illustrators at Disney. Rothe then started her own art and design business which she still owns today.

With a passion for art, and being the ever over achiever, Rothe desired to furthered her classical fine art studies and was given a merit scholarship to attend the Laguna College of Art and Design receiving top honors throughout. In addition to this fine traditional schooling, Rothe has had the opportunity to when living in Europe for six years, to study at fine art ateliers in France and Italy as well as to work directly with many professional contemporary painters, editors, curators, and writers to build her vast knowledge of the creative world.

For the past 16 years Vanessa served as the West Coast Editor of the Nationally ac-claimed art collector magazine FINE ART CONNOISSEUR, creating and writing top stories on the representational art world and lecturing at museums and galleries around the world. She helped redesign the magazine and created different events for the art world including the gathering of top fine artists at important master artist Museum exhibitions and painting together on the groundsof the Museums directly after viewing the show. She has also spent the last four years at the Educational Director of the AmericanImpressionist Society. Rothe currently owns and operates her art and design business as well as Vanessa Rothe Fine Art Gallery representing some of the top realist and impressionists of the world, both historical and contemporary, located at 418 Ocean Ave in the coastal art community of Laguna Beach California. The gallery collection is a meticulously curated selection of work ranging from new modern combination of realistic figures with abstract backgrounds, to tight realism, to loose impressionistic and stunning works. She imports top fine art works from France, Russia, Norway, and even Iceland by artists pushing the envelope on realism and abstraction combinations today, as well as carries a fine selection of historical French, Californian, and Russian impressionism.

In addition to running the gallery Rothe is an independent Curator creating exciting theme based exhibitions in New York, Paris, and California. She is proud to create and consult on exhibitions and the display of fine art works outside of her own space and brings her own selected fine art collection to various top art venues across the world. Along with curating the fine collection for her gallery, Vanessa has innovated many recent successful exhibitions. Her well trained aesthetic eye for quality art, experience, graphic design, web, catalog Impressionist work, along with Historical masterworks, and has recently been known to add drawings and sketches to the exhibits to help portray the raw talent of the artist. Rothe and VRFA Gallery proudly shares in the creation of the current new contemporary realist movement that can be a success with artists combining long learned traditional realism with abstraction and or Impressionism.

Rothe has been curating unique high quality exhibitions for such venues as The California Museum of Fine Art, the LAArt Show 2015, and galleries such as Arcadia, Abend, and the Salmagundi Club New York. She is currently working with a Historical Early California Impressionist collection, and adding them to her unique exhibits in order to compare them with contemporary works, and to tie in important fine art history.Rothe is proud to be inventing some of the most exciting fine art exhibitions in America such as the Americans in Paris bi continental exhibitions in LA and PARIS May of 2018. The Realism Without Borders exhibit December 2017 with over 60 works from around the globe in realism and impressionism and the exciting September 2019 Fine Art of Fashion exhibit at the Salmagundi Club in NYC where she combined top contemporary fashion designers with oil paintings created and inspired by fashion. Here she presented at lecture in the parlor of the Salam Gundi Art Club and a panel with current top designers in the fashion industry discussing their creative process.

As if this was not enough, Rothe has invented new international art projects to aid in the creating and selling of strong new contemporary art work. Rothe is the founder and leader of the“Americans in Paris” Events, Workshops, and Exhibitions. With these AIP events, Rothe had the idea to bring together a dozen top American representational artists from various areas of the USA to travel to Paris to study the masters, and share their influences and their knowledge with one another in order to bring their work to the next level. Rothe had found thru her time as editor for the fine art magazines she had a nation wide look at the art world. She concluded after interviewing many artists that even the top talented realist artists in America and graduates from classical art schools often did not know what they wanted to paint, or were working only in single figure compositions instead of pushing themselves to created group figure scenes. Rothe along with friends invented the Americans in Paris workshops and Exhibitions in order to address this. “I have been fortunate to have traveled half the globe admiring art museums and works and have been mainly influenced and drawn to traditional representational and Impressionist fine art. I admire the drawing skills, layers of slightly varied values, lively colors in Sargent and Sorolla’s works, the value tones and brush stokes of Edgar Payne, the simplicity in the drawings and strokes of Manet and Degas, the colors and overall harmony of Monet and Van Gogh, and the subjects of the Impressionist / Belle Epoque times, as well as to day agreeing that beauty that can be found outdoors and in simple things.”

Vanessa Rothe is the Author/Artist to a series of art instructional books published by the leader in art instructional books, Walter Foster Publishing entitled “An Art School Approach to Oils” which can be found at barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com and ebay.com The book written and illustrated by Rothe has an important beginning section that takes one thru the basics fundamentals of sketching and painting in oils and then a slow step by step chapter by chapter process for beginners in oil.Vanessa was honored to have been invited to be a part of a seminar in Venice Italy for “The Alpine Fellowship” where she was able to discuss and contribute ideas on todays Art and Aesthetics with some of the top writers, art historians, art critics, painters, and poets of today, including Ian McEwan, John Burnside, Ruth Padel, Alan Lawson, Odd Nerdrum and Roger Scruton. Rothe is proud to be sponsored by SENNELIER French oil paints, imported to America by Savoir Faire fine art materials, as well as a new partnership with RAYMAR fine art canvas and linen panels, the support that counts.

Rothe currently owns and operates her fine art gallery where she curates international fine art exhibitions and invents meaningful fine art projects for the art world today. She currently writes articles for Josh Rose atAmerican Art Collector and American Fine Art Magazine, and continues to create and sell her own fine art works.