Arts and Letters

I first met Jane in the late 1970s when I was lucky to work with her daughter Julia Gruen at a downtown art gallery. As soon as Julia introduced me to her parents, Jane and John Gruen, I felt embraced—and I know many feel the same after entering their world. Tonight I also speak for my husband Jim and daughter Lily who love and admire Jane immensely. While writing these thoughts down about her I had trouble using the past tense, for that reason here she is in the present.

When you first meet Jane Wilson her beauty and unaffected glamour are startlingly distractions, and somehow indefinable. But seconds after meeting her, you hear her, and the clear precision of her thinking shifts the focus from her striking form to the deep, questioning content within. Her conversation is full of penetrating comments about painting, life’s inevitable ups and downs, and the occasional pointed (and very funny) comment aimed at the passing parade. Jane and her paintings seem both to reflect each other and connect to each other—the energy coming from each is atmospheric, mysterious, and symbiotic. Her tremendous spatial memory, honed by her hours of observing the big skies of Iowa, allows her to connect all the different landscapes she has experienced. Although she seems to embrace the air itself in her painting, details, and their ability to connect different settings, absorb her as well; for instance as a child she was surprised by the red dirt of Georgia, and then saw red dirt in France and yet again in the paintings of Cezanne, who suggested to her that invention is in these details. This understanding of the world as one big space seems innate to Jane. Nature holds both feeling and memory for her, and those human qualities and habits exist in her paintings as touchstones that emerge and retreat in the middle of her experiments with light, form, and the density of air itself. She understands the visceral power available in painting, such as the ability of a 17th century Spanish still life painter to paint a thorn that makes the viewer feel its sharpness. There are few sweet scenes in her work, but there is a tenderness that approaches heartbreaking. A corner of forbidding sky or a wilted flower joins a sunlit scene to keep things in perspective—Jane indicates that delight needs to join with dismay in order for true beauty to emerge.

Although Jane has always been part of an incredibly lively art and social scene and has visible and deep love for her family and friends, she often claims she is “a great pusher away.” But really, by observing us at a slight distance, it seems she is just getting to know us in more detail before drawing us close—the same way she might study the land around her before creating its atmosphere on a canvas and letting it loose into the air around us. Sitting next to Jane, when her entertaining comments and accompanying laughter cease, you may sit in silence for a time. Then she takes your hand and gives it a kiss, acknowledging you, physical proximity itself, and life’s entire atmosphere in one gesture. Feeling everything around her so intensely she is somehow able to transmit different atmospheres to us so we can be surrounded by both her abstract knowledge and her love. She makes use of everything to help us see beyond our own predictable horizons. A fellow mid-westerner, Mark Twain, suggests “Go to heaven for the weather and hell for the company,” but I doubt Jane needs his good advice. Most likely she is ahead of us as usual, busy creating her own destination—a wild atmosphere, full of floating color, natural wonder, and unanswered questions.

Jane’s mother, Cleone Marquis, was a writer and poet. The poems she wrote seem to predict Jane’s paintings as well as describe Jane herself. I’d like to read a poem she wrote titled “Consolation.”

Consolation

The silent dome of night
Enfolds me like a shroud,
A winding sheet of cloud,
Moist, evanescent light.