Jane Rosen: Paws | Pause by Maya Frodeman Gallery

JANE ROSEN PAW S | PAU S E

05 AUGUST — 26 SEPTEMBER 2021

JANE ROSEN PAW S | PAU S E

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY

Thin Man, 2020 Handblown glass on limestone 71 x 12 x 16 inches

Sand & Celadon Goshawk on Stone, 2020 Handblown pigmented glass on limestone 58 x 8 x 20 inches

Grey Calligraphic Goshawk on Stone, 2019 Handblown pigmented glass on limestone 58 x 8 x 20 inches

Black Marble Raven, 2021 Black marble and limestone 59 x 16 x 8 inches

Cone Scale, 2006 Portuguese marble 25 x 10 3/4 x 3 inches

Fox (Body), 2017 Grey limestone and linen limestone 59 x 11 x 8 inches

Fox (Head), 2017 Grey limestone and linen limestone 60 x 8 x 11 inches

Barred Owl, 2020 Limestone 78 x 8 x 15 inches

Egyptian Man in Horus, 2020 Limestone 77 x 9 x 15 inches

Sienna Lace Chest Bird, 2019 Handblown pigmented glass 16 x 3 x 5 inches

Sebastian’s Landscape, 2018 Handblown pigmented glass 17 x 5 1/2 x 4 1/4 inches 28

White Lace Bird, 2018 Handblown pigmented glass 16 x 5 1/2 x 4 1/4 inches

Camouflage Stripe, 2018 Handblown pigmented glass 14 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches

Water Bird, 2020 Handblown pigmented glass and limestone 59 1/2 x 8 x 10 inches

Ladder Bird on Rough Stone, 2020 Handblown pigmented glass and limestone 34 x 23 x 5 inches

Long Paws, 2021 Limestone 54 x 16 x 24 inches

Swimming Cooper’s, 2019 Provençal limestone and pigment 16 x 4 1/2 x 4 inches

Game of Thrones (GoT), 2020 Beaumaniere and limestone Each 46 x 16 x 13 inches

Paws/Pause, 2021 Handblown pigmented glass, limestone 24 x 97 x 3 inches

Red Paw, 2020 Handblown glass and pigmented limestone 21 x 4 x 3 inches

Paws/Pause, 2021 Ink and gouache on paper 12 x 15 inches

Great Horned Owl (GHO), 2020 Limestone 62 x 8 x 10 inches

Rough Hawk, 2007-2011 Mixed media 24 x 24 x 1 1/2 inches

Stone Morandi Table, 2016 Pigmented limestone 27 x 33 x 14 inches

Tree of Life, 2020 Ink, coffee on paper 60 x 42 inches

Split Second, 2007 Casein and ink on paper 38 x 50 inches

Bronze Buddhi II, ed. of 6, 2016 Cast bronze with unique patina 18 x 5 x 4 inches

Crystal Mei Buddhi, 2016 Cast bronze with unique patina 18 x 5 x 4 inches

Two Bucks, 2021 Handblown pigmented glass 12 x 8 x 15 inches 64

One Buck, 2021 Handblown pigmented glass 17 x 7 x 12 inches

Animal Friends, 2018 Indian paper collage, pigment, coffee, watercolor, and ink on paper 40 x 41 inches

Lola Study, 2020 Gouache and ink on paper 22 x 30 inches

Goshawk Calligraphy Study #2, 2020 Coffee, gouache, ink on paper 21 x 17 inches

Goshawk Calligraphy Study #1, 2020 Coffee, gouache, ink on paper 21 x 17 inches

Little Gypsy (AP 1/1), 2020 Archival pigment print handpainted with coffee on German etching paper 14 x 17 inches

Red Tail Eagle, 2020 Gouache and ink on paper 30 x 22 inches

Raven and Quail Story, 2017 Ink, ink wash, gouache 30 x 45 inches

Egyptian Bird with Man, 2010 Ink, Korean watercolor and beeswax 22 x 30 inches

Change of Tune, 2009-2015 Casein, charcoal, rabbit skin glue and paper on wood 24 x 48 x 1 inches

Bicoastal Cigar, 1996 Ink, casein and charcoal on paper Framed dimensions: 35 x 48 x 2 inches

Saving Big Bucks, 2003 Ink, charcoal and casein on paper 39 1/2 x 45 1/2 inches

JANE ROSEN PAW S | PAUSE

Straight-to-the-point, and never short on brilliance, Jane Rosen is a force majeure in the contemporary art world. Jane is also possibly the most interesting woman in the world. A conversation with Rosen leaves one starry-eyed (awestruck, really) and doubled over with laughter simultaneously. In the course of minutes, Jane welcomes you into her world, an idyllic horse property in rural California with incredible light that she’s converted to an artist’s studio. All at once, you’re engulfed in a never-ending cast of characters, human and animal, who make up her wonderful world. A conversation with Jane Rosen is simply an experience one never wants to end.

exhibition at Tayloe Piggott Gallery planned for August 2021. She described the exhibition as a series of vignettes gleaned from the arc of her life, which has, in a sense, been defined by the dogs by her side. “Thank god I knew early on I needed to tell my story,” she says. Beginning with Tartuffe, a stray rescued from the train station while studying at Cornell, that story relies upon supporting characters with tails. The title piece, Paws | Pause, presents a series of elongated stone, marble inlay and glasswork paws that hang, punctuated at intervals, and casually arranged in tribute to late artist Susan Rothenberg upon the wall. “Some of those are my stone, some of those are my material, some of them are handblown glass…” Without words, Rosen pays tribute to each of the animals who have guided her and sat by her side through the years. Each of these sculptural paws allot a pensive pause in time.

It’s also the conversation that surrounds her work. There’s an unconscious melding of her world with her art. The two are justly inseparable: Jane Rosen is always working. Within walking distance from her home, her naturally lit studio is home to a veritable menagerie of animal forms. An enormous marble raven commiserates with glass accipiters perched along the wall; a 7-ft. limestone Barred Owl looks out to his neighbor, Egyptian Man in Horus. It’s as though these beings compel the artist to bring them forth, whether in stone, or handblown glass, or in intimate, painted mixed media works on paper she playfully calls her “drawings.” Truly, Jane Rosen encapsulates the image of an artist in the prime of her career. And through her work, Rosen is the ultimate storyteller.

Reflecting on the dogs of past to present-day gives one the sense of Jane the human, who is very much present within Jane the artist. The love streams over the cellular waves, in colorful snippets and quick catches of the breath. There was the dog of college-aged Jane: “Many, many years ago, I was coming home for Thanksgiving, and I went to the train station, and there was this little black dog sitting there in the train station. And it was a tiny little black puppy. I said, “We can’t leave him, daddy.” And he said, “Well, mom’s not going to let him in the house, he’s filthy. So it’s Thanksgiving [in New York], and my dad and I are outside, washing this little puppy, and he turns

In a recent conversation with Jane the topic of conversation was PAWS | PAUSE, our expansive

out to be a black and white spotted dog. I was at Cornell at the time, and was reading this play by Molière, Tartuffe. So I called him Tartuffe!”

the city. Having graduated from NYU, Rosen also studied at the Art Students League, and held a senior faculty position at the New York School of Visual Arts. She studied under well-known names like Sol LeWitt, Chuck Close and Esteban Vicente, and herself enjoyed an active career as an arts educator at prestigious institutions, including over 10 years at UC Berkeley. She was revered among her students, many of whom have taken her signature drawing lessons into their own teaching practices.

And the legendary Mayo: “Oh, Mayo! I drove this dog back and forth across America every year. And I found her water features all along the route… this was before cell phones. Because she loved them.” Jane at 70 adopted not one but two shelter pups, Mei Rose and Bookie, who regularly raise hell on the farm. “May we all come back as one of Rosen’s pets,” mused a friend. Bookie ‘sings’ along to the Outlander soundtrack. “We’ve decided that Book is not a literary guy; he’s a Malinois. So we changed his name to Buck. So now we’ve changed his name to Buckaroo. And he’s honestly calmed down! Because he really wanted to be a defensive linebacker. He didn’t want to be an art critic. [laughs]”

Rosen was selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion in their 2010 Annual Invitational in New York, a prestigious exhibition juried by some of the greatest artists of our time. A masterful and sought-after teacher, Rosen has taught at numerous elite institutions, including the School of Visual Arts and Bard College in New York, Lacoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley. Rosen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, and Art News. Her work has been exhibited across the United States. It is in numerous public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Chevron Corporation, the collection of Grace Borgenicht, JP Morgan Chase Bank, the Luso American Foundation, the Mallin Collection, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and the Museum of

A few years ago, in a conversation with Richard Whittaker, Jane Rosen spoke about art in a way that gets to the heart of Paws | Pause: “I say art is the language of the body and feeling, trying to make a relationship between the disconnected part of my mind [that] is desperately trying to understand. That, as a possibility, is what art does. It’s informing and transforming another part of myself, and showing me what’s really going on.” That is also, it so happens, what dogs do.

Contemporary Art San Diego.

Jane Rosen is a born and bred New Yorker, despite having settled on her farm in rural California over 30 years ago. Rosen’s childhood in the city involved regular visits to the Egyptian collection of hawks and falcons at the Met, as well as easy familiarity with the art collections in

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanking all of those traveling through this artful life brings great joy. Paws | Pause is the culmination of years of work and life with my animal friends made immortal, much as ancient animal art speaks across time, of all that is given in the natural world. Pure gesture. Finishing the Paws | Pause pieces after ten years of various teams working together on them could only happen during a pause that the pandemic created. A pause that allowed the Dual Nature publication to be written. Pointed Leaf Press and Suzy Slesin enlivened our histories in print, which brought about a synthesis of past and present in a way that brought tears of joy. Endless gratitude for my amazing studio team of Sebastian Ages and Shannon Belardi, with help from Gustavo Gutierrez, whose energy brought to fruition work that had waited years for their time in the sun. Ross Richmond provided his mastery in blown glass pieces that interfaced land and sky and together the studio gave a sense of above and below with pups, bucks, birds, and the hieroglyph of paw gestures speaking to all of us in the language of art, bypassing the difficulty of the times we passed through. Sebastian Ages carved as if led by some magic gift with sure vision and great skill as they brought the impossible into possibility and being. The maestros. Photography provided by Dona Tracy, Sebastian Ages, Laurie Frankel, Alexander Rohrig, Shannon Belardi, and Pointed Leaf Press. Daily the extraordinary team at Tayloe Piggott Gallery collaborated and refined (with love, enthusiasm and Ortega chocolates) what this historic show needed to be, to embody. We all cherished the time we spent planning what really is the culmination of the dream of Tayloe and Jane. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Buddhis all!

Jane Rosen

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