Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Husband, wife create art each in their own way
BELLA VISTA — Rosie and Dave Floyd are a local couple who both love to create art, each in their own way.
Rosie started drawing as a young child. She came from a large family of nine children. Her older brothers and sisters were drawing and inspired her to do more with her art. She attended a parochial school in Yoakum, Texas, and in religion classes the nuns would ask the students to draw scenes from the Bible. Young Rosie had a first communion Bible with artwork, and she copied the pictures from it.
“The nuns were thrilled,” she said.
Her father was in the newspaper industry all his life, she said, and her parents bought a newspaper in Yorktown, Texas. Her father published some of her drawings in the newspaper, and she also made pen-and-ink covers for some genealogies that her father published. At the local school, all the teachers realized that Rosie could draw, and she ended up doing a lot of artwork for signs for school events, she said.
She decided to go to Texas State Technical College in Waco to pursue an associate of applied art degree in commercial art. She learned watercolor, pastels and how to ready her work for commercial publishing.
She moved to Bastrop, Texas, and started working for the University of Texas at Austin with the Bureau of Economic Geology where she was a typesetter and processed papers using computers. Then she moved to Bastrop, Texas, and worked for a school district processing accreditation paperwork and working for the special education co-op, using her computer background from her previous job. She worked there 20 years doing purchase orders, budgets and lots of computer work, she said.
She joined the Bastrop Fine Art Guild at age 40, and the group mentored her on how to display her art in a gallery and encouraged her, she said.
“I felt like I needed to do something with my art. I hadn’t had time,” she said.
She entered shows, and her art was exhibited in a gallery. She was in an annual event called Art on the Bridge, she said.
In 2006 she met Dave, and they got married.
“He’s a musician. He was excited about getting back into arts. We found out we enjoyed being creative together,” she said.
She painted some parrots on a guitar, and Dave took a photo and uploaded it to a computer and used artificial intelligence to add effects to the image that look like fireflies, she said. The image was shown at their wedding.
They moved to Austin, Texas, and she joined the Austin Pastel Society. She created a landscape pastel that won second place, and it sold to a family.
“I always cry when I sell a piece,” she said.
They moved to Point Venture, Texas, and became very active in the Williamson County Art Guild, she said. There was a big event at the Texas State University Campus where they both exhibited, Rosie with acrylic paintings and Dave with digital art.
When they moved to Bella Vista, they joined Artists of Northwest Arkansas and became very active, she said. For a year and a half she has displayed many paintings and has sold a sunflower painting. They joined Wishing Spring Gallery in Bella Vista.
She is second vice president and membership chair for the Bella Vista Artisan Alliance, which Wishing Spring Gallery is a part of, she said. They have both displayed art there.
She usually paints landscapes or portraits, she said.
Dave creates digital art through AI.
“I got into it because I was always telling her, ‘Paint this, paint this.’ She always did a good job. I’m sure it got frustrating for her,” he said.
He was a rock guitarist for 40 years, he said. Most of his art is based on music.
“Digital art is essentially endless. You can create anything,” he said. “What you’re doing is contextualizing your art and sending it. You create sentences about what is there or what I see in my mind. You generate it and then correct it with negative prompts where it went wrong.”
Rosie said she can get a piece finished within a day if she really concentrates, but Dave can complete one within an hour.
Dave said he is going to teach free classes in their home.
“It’s such a thinking process. It’s kind of like mental weight lifting. If you have kids, you can expand their capacity to contextualize and verbalize.”
He said it can also help elderly people to organize their thoughts.
He added the benefits of AI are really strong in education. Most people want to write a book and never do, he said. With AI, he can prompt it to write a story with a handful of details.
“My goal is to humanize it,” he said.
The benefits also extend to small businesses that cannot spend a lot on advertising, he said.
Teachers can use it for testing and lesson plans, he said. Families can work on projects together.
“I’ve spent thousands of hours,” he said. “It just has no value unless you can humanize it and it can make people’s lives better.”