♪♪ [Rose Fransen] I grew up here in Maquoketa, Iowa.

I'm one of six kids.

I wanted to be an artist.

I think the way — I have lots of ways I tell that story.

When I first decided to be an artist, I think the first time I remember saying I wanted to be an artist when I was seven.

[Nebbe] Rose Fransen has gained national and international acclaim for her oil paintings.

She attended art school in Chicago, where she met her mentor who would help shape her future as an artist.

[Fransen] The mentor that really inspired me, Richard Schmidt, his quote was, I don't paint what I think, I paint what I see.

So, a lot about the way I learned to paint is by learning to see.

And you allow yourself to interpret the world that you're seeing through your brush.

But now, 40 years into it, as a teacher myself, I say I don't paint what I think, I paint what I see.

But it doesn't mean I can't think about what I see.

And that's not only to understand it technically, but it's also to understand it emotionally, spiritually, philosophically, and thoughtfully.

[Nebbe] In 1991, Rose and her parents, Wayne and Ellen, purchased the Old City Hall building in Maquoketa.

Today it's a fine art gallery, featuring works by Rose and her husband, artist Charles Morris.

[Fransen] You know, it's interesting that what you're seeing here today in the gallery, you're seeing kind of decades of work.

You're seeing work from my earliest years all the way up until a couple of months ago.

And you're going to see lots of different styles.

I use objects that we can recognize.

I paint them in a relatively loose but yet at times tight style.

So, you could say gestural brushwork, colorful.

So, people used to call that, like, realist impressionist.

I'm not quite sure that's what you would call it anymore, but maybe a representational painter.

And then there's other paintings that I do in the gallery that are called Trompe-l'oeil, Trick the Eye, where you actually make the object look like it's real.

So, my range is pretty broad now, if you think about it over the decades, which is, I think, kind of fun, kind of interesting.

[Nebbe] A highlight of Rose's work is Portrait of Maquoketa, a collection of 180 portraits that she painted of people in her hometown over the course of one year.

[Fransen] So basically, that project, what we did was we had people come and sit in a space on Main Street for four hours.

It was a pretty profound experience, sitting across from my neighbors.

And it was interesting.

I thought at the beginning, one of the things is that I would be giving Maquoketa something.

But I realized that I had the best seat in the house.

The people that I painted sitting across from anybody every day, it was as if you can really second guess or change your mind about what you think of people when you give them some time and some space, where you just engage.

[Nebbe] Portrait of Maquoketa was exhibited at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and is now a part of the permanent collection at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport.

[Fransen] One of the things I learned from Portrait of Maquoketa that people suffer from the most was they don't feel seen.

And what Portrait of Maquoketa was, was a chance for somebody to feel seen for four hours.

[Nebbe] While she continues to travel the country and world for her work, there are many reasons, both personal and professional, why Maquoketa remains her home base.

[Fransen] I think that we found that you could actually, in a small town, start to make a difference.

And Chuck and I both, my husband and I both wanted make a difference, right?

We want to be people who feel like we're contributing, and we want to feel like we're contributing to community.

And I think Maquoketa is a place where we felt like we could do it.

[Nebbe] Rose often ponders how art best serves the community and strives to bring her work to people who don't always get a chance to experience art.

[Fransen] When I started painting, I started painting by looking at objects and painting them as I saw them.

And it wasn't too long that I wanted to tell a story that would wake me up in the middle of the night and paint from that story, which would be a world you don't see.

And I would say that would be the driving factor of my work since I learned to paint.

So, some of the work in the show here is work that I think is kind of addressing, like, some.

How do I address the national conversation?

Like, how do I talk about all the conversations that are happening around us?

Or how we treat each other, or how we see other people, how we don't see each other.

It's as if questions drive my work and my work, my skill of painting has had to change and evolve by the questions that I'm asking myself.

So, whatever's going on internally, externally, I like to put it on the easel.

[Nebbe] Rose's paintings impact and inspire those who witness them.

Something she never takes for granted.

[Fransen] There's something about this witnessing of the world that we live in and trying to figure out how to capture it and put it down that is so, so, so fundamentally human and so available for all of us to do.

I like the idea that when you're creating, you're not destroying.

It's the opposite of destruction, isn't it?

And it's interesting because some art is like you deconstruct things in order to reconstruct it.

But art is this movement that I think is absolutely fundamental to the human experience.

And how can I not be lucky that I live in that, you know, make something.

I get to make something all day long, right?