BY KAREN BOSSICK

Vessels occupy the focal point of many of Rana Rochat’s encaustic works.

Some look empty. Some have contents spilling out of them.

It’s up to viewers to determine what the symbols mean, as it’s up to viewers to make sense of seed-like oval forms, egg-like sketches and markings that look like bits of string.

Rochat says they’re part of her language—“a spontaneous spitting out,” if you will.

”Their primary focus is on rhythm and cadence that I try to convey through color, line and forms. As such, they are purely expressive or lyrical, not narrative. My paintings are there to let the mind of viewer run free and float through colors and patterns, moods and emotions,” she said.

Rochat has shown her work at Gail Severn Gallery for more than a dozen years. This month she has a solo exhibition that is bright and colorful—a harbinger of spring. The works will be on display during Friday’s Gallery Walk from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 16, at the gallery, 400 First Avenue North in Ketchum.

All are singular pieces, in contrast with the diptyches she did in the past.

“They’re more playful, colorful. Fun and bright. Pinks and oranges. They feel like spring,” said Gallery owner Gail Severn.

The Memphis-born Rochat studied printmaking and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, then headed to New York where she began designing and selling T-shirts on the street. Soon she found herself wholesaling to stores in New York and Japan—her T-shirt business so time consuming that she couldn’t get any painting done.

She finally put her foot down and asked a Japanese man who had been licensing her designs not to call her for a year.

Rochat spent that year working on paintings and, by the time he called her again, she was immersed in a new career as a fine artist whose works would go on to be shown in such venues as the San Francisco International Art Exposition and the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art in Jacksonville, Fla.

Her early work incorporated literal images of tree, flowers and other botanicals.

Then Rana changed to encaustic, an ancient technique of painting with warm wax to which pigment had been added.

That led her away from realistic art to more mark-making with its motifs of circles, loops and spirals. She made a deliberate choice to stop showing everything—hence, the markings that evoke thoughts of butterflies and flowers without claiming to be.

“I love encaustic—the sensuality and lusciousness. And her use of color—it’s really wonderful,” said Severn.

Rochat works on wood panel. But she also works on paper.

“Paper is very difficult to work on, but she does and she’s one of the few who does,” said Severn.