"Films and ephemera from the early sixties have such a profound effect on me. Watching the television reruns as a child I sensed the yawing chasm of time between myself and when these films were made. I longed for and reminisced about a past I never had. Yet I felt a great connection to that time and saw great beauty in the way the world was. The beauty that I found though is fleeting, unobtainable, intangible. A word or gesture, a look, a scene, glimpsed from a moving car...To create a work of art form that scene is to extend that glimpse of beauty for a few moments more.

"Films of the past allow us to discover time, the knowledge that the actor we see on the screen who "struts and frets his hour upon the stage" must now be quite old and no longer appear that way. I believe that we can sense the age and gravity of a thing without having any prior experience or knowledge of it. Such as when we are confronted with sepia tone photographs or images of the past we immediately begin to reminisce. We experience feelings of nostalgia for times and places we have never been or for people we have never met."

‍- Steve Rosendale, 2021‍

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“Rosendale translates to canvas the brash, intriguing character of the city street. Like its mysterious inhabitants, the city is seductive and enticing, yet its magic belies a hidden, sinister side. The artist’s cool detachment allows these deeply psychological cityscapes to speak for themselves. The city breathes, has a certain pulse or rhythm, and is animated by an everchanging personality.” ‍

- Dr Melissa Miles, 2019

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'At the core of Rosendale’s work is the exploration of the past, and the ability to re-tell those images in a contemporary and cinematic language. These vignettes are at once familiar and obscure, reaching into realms of the viewer’s collective memory. A crystalline assertion of outstanding draftsmanship and the bravura technique of masterful painting are trademarks of Rosendale’s oeuvre. Episodic images are then transformed into something much more than the original images could ever create. They are imbued with mystery. There is alchemy at work here... Rosendale draws upon a tradition that’s all around us. Like Cartier- Bresson, and Hopper, he captures the everyday. As an archivist, he tirelessly trawls the collective subconscious, and discarded fragments of memory. Equipped with his eye for the compositional, he juxtaposes iconography into something intransigent and thrilling. His is the master of cinematic subterfuge. By re-telling a good story, and enhancing it with the indefinable sense of “what if?”, you feel that you are privy to something private, intimate and special. It’s an almost secretive embrace, in which, the spirit of the past with the present, tempts us with an unanswered question.”

- David McCubbin, 2018