Jane E. Goldman - Audubon Passenger Pigeon
American, b.1951
Audubon Passenger Pigeon, 2005
16-c screenprint, 22 x 30 inches
Edition 18/65
Stewart & Stewart
07.019

Gift in honor of Kathleen Dolan from grateful students

Jane Goldman is a nationally recognized painter, printmaker, co-owner/director of Mixit Print Studio in Somerville, Massachusetts, and a fine arts instructor who has taught at major universities, and a visiting artist at many institutions, including Harvard University. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe and is in the permanent collections of Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Goldman's media includes watercolor, oil, intaglio, lithography, relief, screenprint, and terrazzo. Completed in 1999, Goldman designed a public art installation for the Massachusetts Port Authority at Boston's Logan Airport. The theme of the commission is a New England aquatic journey. The design flows over 35,000 square feet of terrazzo floor.

Known for her "lyrical realism," Goldman combines direct observation and free association. In Audubon, she presents a tabletop still life that includes a potted flowering plant, a glass vase of flowers, and an artist's portfolio opened flat to reveal what appears to be the artist's free copy of the Louisiana Heron, one of the large-scale hand colored etchings from John James Audubon's magisterial masterpiece, The Birds of America (1827-38). Goldman blends two floral arrangements, planted and cut, with her own imaginative watercolor transcription of another American artist's vision of nature. She joins the natural and the artistic with the shadows cast by the flowers. Infused with a variety of blues, they provide further poetic habitat for the heron and echo its blue plumage. "This still life series displays my abiding interest in the world of objects bathed in light, inviting meditation on their metaphysical properties."