People

Rose Abrahamson is our featured artist this issue. Rose says "at my age, death and time are my friends." It could be a Samuel Beckett quote. But it's her's. It says a lot. Rose lives in the time of a person struck by timelessness, the timelessness of an imagination in continuous motion. In such a life, it is possible, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, to lose "the dancer in the dance." In Rose Abrahamson the labor of life, "blossoming or dancing," is continuous. And, at almost 88 her "interior" life surfaces and recedes constantly. It blooms in conversation and recedes in memory. That surface and bloom is most available in her painting. Through the paintings she's done is a gateway, an aperture that lifts the spirit. It separates us from how's or why's of our perception and gets us to be in some half-symbolic state of being. With Rose this is a safe, fluid place of imagination, and there, for an instant is our own timelessness too. We become friends with it and her.
As she said, "I don't know where my paintings come from. But the deeper I go the more people respond — more people relate — It's like my imagination is a collective imagination.