"Last Rays of the Sun" by Rossitza Todorova

Rossitza Todorova bio

Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Rossitza Todorova immigrated to the United States as a child. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2005 and her Master of Fine Arts degree in Drawing from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, School of Art at Arizona State University in 2013. Todorova is a Professor of Art at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada.

Rossitza Todorova's artwork is in the permanent collections of the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe, Tucson Museum of Art, the University of Arizona Art Museum in Tucson, the Painting and Sculpture Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, and numerous private collections. She is a recipient of the 2015 Phoenix Art Museum Contemporary Forum Artist Grant and was a 2013 Squire Sanders Art Fellow. Her work is featured in catalogs and publications, including the 2013 Lark Crafts publication "500 Artists Books: Volume 2," 2014, "Studio Visit, Volume 25," 2016 "Superstition Review-Journal, Issue 18," and 2019, "Create! Magazine, Issue 14." She currently makes artwork out of her studio at Artemisia Studios in Reno, Nevada.

Artist Statement

In her current series, “Memory of a Landscape,” Rossitza Todorova explores how landscape embodies the idea of time: past, present, and future. The landscape reflects our memories by helping us recall and associate a place with history. It captures our present by allowing us to let go and be in the moment. And shows us our future, metaphorically and literally, as it reveals the journey ahead. 

In the words of Ken Taylor, "one of our deepest needs is for a scene of identity and belonging, and a common denominator in this is human attachment to landscape and how we find identity in landscape and place. Landscape, therefore, is not simply what we see but a way of seeing: we see it when our eyes but interpret it with our mind and ascribe value to landscape for intangible - spiritual - reasons. Landscape can, therefore, be seen as a cultural construct in which our sense of place and memories inhere." 

In this series, Todorova depicts the landscape of the Great Basin inspired by walks around reno, hiking in Tahoe, and her recent residency at Playa Summer Lake in Southern Oregon. In her paintings, she interrupts the viewer by scrolling lines in the space between the viewer and the vista beyond. The forms are visual metaphors for what we bring as we view the desert. They are the reflections of ourselves that we place on the landscape. As Henri Frédéric Amiel eloquently said, "Any landscape is a condition of the spirit."