A Spirit Place
Artist Jane Rosen honors the magic of nature
Grey Crystal Bird
Jane Rosen
Kiln-cast crystal and pigmented limestone
71 x 8 x 10 inches
janerosen.com, gailseverngallery.com
THE ARTIST Jane Rosen
BIRD WATCHING “Growing up, I would go every week to the Metropolitan Museum, and I’d sit in the Egyptian wing and look at these amazing stone carvings of Horus, the Sun God. And that’s the main reason my birds are posted; he was the highest god and he was that which could see both in and out simultaneously.”
THE CALL OF CALIFORNIA “I was going back to New York—I was on a sabbatical and I had a fairly good career in New York—and this red-tailed hawk circled over my head, and I could hear him saying, ‘Stay here; tell my story.’ And I thought, well, okay.”
THE MAGIC OF NATURE “To me, this is a spirit place. And it’s so worth it, because what you’re given is an ability to participate actively with the quiet. It feels like you have to slow down from domestic time in order to live in landscape time, and that magic will reveal itself to you.”
EVOLUTION THROUGH GLASS “Glass has just changed my life. It’s a glorious alchemy working in the materials—the sand to molten liquid, the heat, the layers—all reiterating the complexity of growth in nature.”
SHARING THE LESSONS OF THE LAND “I’ve been given this extraordinary life. I want to share what I see when that posted hawk is sitting there in late afternoon sun; glowing, watching, silent. Because if people saw what I saw, they wouldn’t kill it. They wouldn’t cut down the trees; they wouldn’t poison the land.”
NEXT The Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum, Idaho, will include Rosen’s work in Past as Prologue, December 20, 2019, to January 31, 2020, and will host a solo show of her drawings and sculptures in August 2020.
