Elisa Rossi: Allegories for Cosmic Creation

Dragon Bride, 2022, Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

By KATE HOAG July 9, 2025

When artist Elisa Rossi talks about painting dragons, she doesn’t speak of it as if what she is painting is a monster. For her, the dragon represents something else entirely. Rossi views the dragons she paints as a guide, a companion, a gatekeeper to places far beyond the edge of waking life.

“It’s been a while since I had the symbolism of the dragon coming back in my work,” Rossi says. “But I was waiting for it.” Her latest canvas, the fifth in an unfolding dragon series, is just the first sketch layer. Still, she knows what’s emerging: an “androgynous dragon energy,” what she describes as “a cosmic womb—creation and dissolution.”

Rossi didn’t set out to paint dragons, though animals and non-terrestrial beings appear frequently throughout her work. Years ago, she was asked to translate The Book of the Dragon by an Italian mystic. She laughs now, feeling as though it was meant to be, especially given that the author’s studio turned out to be only ten minutes from her own family’s home. In that text, the dragon is an “allegory for cosmic creation,” divided into different gates containing colors, elements, thresholds of life, death, and rebirth.

Cusp of Magic, 2023, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

For Rossi, the dragon returned during past-life regression sessions: a marble monastery, a library filled with books, a dragon waiting at the end of a corridor, all feeling weirdly familiar. “I had no fear around him and there was a telepathic communication. And I knew that we've been together for many lifetimes, ” she recalls.

These visions aren’t mere inspiration; they’re at the root of how Rossi paints. Since childhood, she has seen the same faces, shapes, and elongated skulls appear everywhere—in tiles, in rocks, in her earliest drawings. “They’ve always been there,” she says. “ It’s not that I’m inventing something. Painting is more like revealing them.”

Rossi’s process is less about planning and more about listening. Sometimes, she sketches for weeks before starting a canvas. Other times, it’s more urgent. “It’s almost like being summoned—they want to come out right now.” She spends weeks working on the background—layers of wash, oil, and wax, all designed to catch accidents, shadows, and subtle marks. “Every accident becomes a starting point for part of the composition,” she says. 

Elisa Rossi, in studio, courtesy of artist

Once the ground feels alive, she begins carving, literally. “When the paint is semi-dry, I start to sketch all the composition, but not with charcoal—with a knife. Which is an interesting way of sketching the composition because when you carve, you're basically subtracting, but in a way, I'm adding the composition.”

At the center of it all is trust in her intuition, which wasn’t always easy for her to do. “For me, it’s been a lifelong battle,” Rossi says. “When I was a child, I was obsessed with drawing all the time. But people would tell me what I was doing was ridiculous. One teacher told me, ‘Forget about it, do anything else, but don’t do art.’”

Rossi transformed this doubt into motivation. “It's practice,” she says. “You need to practice trust and intuition every day, even outside the studio. You need to know how it feels. It always comes from the heart—when you feel something there, you know it’s true.”

All Falls To Rise, 2022, Mixed media on cardboard, 39 x 40 inches

Her past studies in Jungian analysis helped shape that trust. “Shadow work stitches the soul back together,” she says. “When the nervous system shuts down in childhood, parts of the soul get scattered. But when you bring them back, then you feel whole again — that’s when creation can take place.”

If the dragon is her companion, her paintings are the portals. In one piece, All Falls to Rise, Rossi gathered every theme she’s been exploring recently: transmutation, resurrection, wholeness. “There’s this central figure, a child with half a smile, surrounded by what seems to be dying, dismembered bodies. But a golden thread connects the figure to the sun—it’s like Christian iconography yet also pagan, representing the sun as a symbol of life. It’s alchemy—nothing is ever lost, only transformed.”

For Rossi, when painting, even the music matters. She rarely works in silence and considers sound to be a key part of her process. “When I was painting All Falls to Rise, I found this soundtrack that was just perfect,” she says. When working she listens to. Instrumental sound, ocean waves, dolphin noises, essentially music that doesn’t impose a narrative but holds space open for the symbols to emerge on their own. “I listen to specific sounds that go together with the art. I don’t listen to music with lyrics anymore.” Yet another example of how Rossi, and her process has evolved. 

You Blew My Mind, 2021, Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 36 x 58 inches

Early on, Rossi’s style was explosive, “like a volcano eruption.” Now she says it’s less “out of control and overwhelming” and more like simmering magma underneath the volcano. But no matter how Rossi and her process continue to evolve, the heart of it stays the same, trust your intuition and follow the dragon.

You can see Elisa Rossi’s work next in the exhibition Dream Logic, with Wienholt Projects, opening at Baxter Leymoyne Estate in LA on July 19, 2025. To see more, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @ella_blisss.