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I start each morning in the studio, sitting on a sofa looking out big glass doors to the southeast, overlooking a field of mixed grasses with a small spring fed pond in the center. The pond is a constant, but different every day. Sometimes the wind blows across, rippling the water. When it’s still, the water is reflective. It freezes, sparkles in the sun and thaws. Eagles fly over nearly every winter day. In March a cacophony of migrating blackbirds come in droves, migrating, looking for food, landing on the cattails that surround the pond. Ducks land in droves in the evenings. Many deer come across nearly always west to east, a hawk family hunts every day. The field greens up, frogs start singing, an occasional coyote passes by. In late summer the prairie grasses rise and begin to turn, sunflowers bloom, winds shift, migrations begin again.
In this way, all of my work emerges from the pond in the field.
– Jane Booth, 2021
At the beginning of 2020, Jane Booth opened Instinct, a stunning exhibition of mostly large-scale paintings at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, MO. Independent curator and past Director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO, Barbara O’Brien wrote an insightful and thoughtful essay on the show, Falling-away Spaces. Then the pandemic shut everything down. Booth’s show remained up in the museum throughout the year in a stunning, silent, almost sacred, space and publication plans for the essay evaporated.
The Pond in the Field showcases stunning paintings that were debuted in the Daum exhibition supported by new work, done during this most strange of all years, inspired and sustained by Booth’s muse – the land, sky and water that surround her. In addition, in a cooperative collaboration made possible by the artist, Barbara O’Brien and designer, Claudia Marchand, the long awaited catalog has been published and will be available at the gallery.
Jane Booth’s paintings are in public collections throughout the country including: Kansas University Hospital, Kansas City, MO; Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, H& R Block World Headquarters and Hilton Hotels as well as the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO.
