Cartoonist, illustrator, graphic artist and a print silkscreen artist, Rebecca Rosen was born in Montreal and now lives in Brussels.
She draws and prints at à L'Appât, the silkscreening and micro-publishing studio she manages together with Quentin Pillot.
Her first cartoon, first published in English under the name “FLEM” (Conundrum Press, 2018), is now available in French, called “Morveuse” (L'employé du moi, 2019). It’s the tormented journey of a young woman in her attempt to join radical feminist groups.
As an ardent feminist, Rebecca Rosen first expressed her activism creating activist posters before embarking on narrative formats, first through fanzines and then cartoons.
Her work frequently has you view the history of art through a feminist prism, a feature that’s also present in her new illustration/print project, “The Power of Women” (2018). In this work, she takes her own twist on the 16th-Century woodcut series of the same name by Lucas Van Leyden. We also see this feminist approach in her new current project, “Mayken”.
Her Curieuse Résidence
Rebecca Rosen’s Curieuse Résidence is based on her new comic strip : a fiction based on the life of Mayken Verhulst, a 16th-Century painter and printmaker. Though she was well-known at the time, there are no surviving pieces that can be credited to her with certainty. Today, she’s mostly known as the wife of artist Pieter Coeck van Aelst, the mother-in-law of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and the grandmother (and teacher) of Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder.
Even though Mayken’s story takes place in the distant past, her situation continues to resonate with many female artists, even today. Behind the artist-man-genius-solitary myth, a perfect example being Bruegel, we often see the story of an artist-woman-wife-mother: all the Maykens who had hardly been heard of, if at all.
By sharing the results of her historic and visual research throughout her whole creation process, Rebecca Rosen plans to challenge the status of women who work in the different fields of art – sometimes by having to jump through serious hoops – particularly in the field of cartooning.
