Rose Abrahamson

Rose Abrahamson – Martha's Vineyard Artist

I conjure up "spirits from the vasty deep." Perhaps every painter seeks, through the medium of art, to explore what it means to be human. For me that inquiry has been conducted with whatever material comes to hand, be it paint collage, found objects or ephemeral material such as leaves and twigs. Leonardo de Vinci advised painters who lacked inspiration to contemplate with a reflective eye the cracks in an old wall. He said there is a map of the universe in the lines that time draws on these old walls.

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An Interview with Rose Abrahamson

In art Rose's world is Natural, unencumbered by alarms, agitation — free to immerse... an imagination unbridled, unfettered. Martha's Vineyard provides transparent access to that freedom. To her, art, Nature and imagination provide the freedom to be human.

Artist Profile

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.