Lily

The 11th of an edition of 25 prints, this work reinforces the sense of intimacy in the way that the frame cuts off some of stem and leaves, as though we were so close that not all of the flower is in our visual field. Rogers said “I usually select a fragment … and expand this to suggest something more or different, to make the fragment.” This close-up allows us to appreciate the creamy color of the veins of the petals and their slightly scalloped contours.

Dancing Tulips

This is the 10th of an edition of 25 that Rogers printed and emphasizes the long elegant stems and leaves of the tulips to contrast with the graceful nod of the heavy red flowers. While the red petals are smooth, the bright green (on the color wheel, the complement of red) on the stem varies in intensity, becoming white in places. This image, too, is a profile portrait of the flowers, which the artist saw as dancing against the deep black ground.

4 Zinnias

Again we get a close-up, this time of four zinnias in differing colors. Their typically irregularly curved stems and coarse, drooping leaves, when abstracted, suggest that these are figures interacting with one another: bowing, retreating, standing to one side. The creamy white and colored petals create visual drama in the upper half of the composition. Notice how the two zinnias at right present us with a strong profile, while the red and pink ones at left, which are shown frontally, suggest deep space behind this foregrounded group portrait. 

Layers of Time in the Garden, IV, 2010

Materials: digitally scanned and manipulated print on archival paper,  41" x 50.5”

Location at Summa: Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion

About the art:

This busy composition is an image that P.J. Rogers imagined rather than photographed as a whole. She usually began with flowers in her garden, but here the flowers represented - purslane (Portulaca oleracea) and primrose (Primula vulgaris) -- were photographed separately and then imported digitally, integrated into another image of a lichenous, rocky background.  The bright yellow, cup-shaped blossoms of portulaca and the red-purple, daisy-like primula are not necessarily found in nature as companions, so we are witnessing the artist making choices.  But this is what the artist does: A world, formed by experiences all around us, remade or re-visioned to express an idea or vision.

In this particular case, the result of this composing and imagining is a very large (more than 3' by 4'!) digital image, one of several printed for Rogers by Akron photographer and gallerist Paul Duda, so that, in her own words, she "could see what they look like" at such scale. 

Toward the end of Rogers’ life, having had to abandon the materials of traditional print media that had grown toxic to her, she set about to learn newly available digital tools that enabled her to keep realizing the kinds of images that she had long had in her head.  This print was one of only two made in this size and one of four in a series that the artist entitled "Layers of Time in the Garden", which may have, in part, referred to the layering function of digital tools.  Her earlier works P.J. Rogers described as landscapes presented as still-lifes, while her botanical series, created as she experimented with new digital tools such as the scanner (and represented in the Summa Collection by five glorious  prints), feel more like portraits. But this image engulfs us with a dizzying array of textures and with color both subtle and vibrant: For all its intimacy of viewpoint, this work has become a landscape.

The Summa Collection was fortunate in acquiring this print from the artist's estate thanks to her daughter, Sarah Rogers.

P.J. Rogers completed an undergraduate degree at Wells College and then studied at the University of Buffalo, during which time she also had painting lessons with sculptor Lazlo Szabo and then studied at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy with painter and printer Victor Hammer.  She began her artistic career as a painter and then, captivated by the processes of printmaking, taught herself what she needed to know to become an artist noted for her aquatints.  These she exhibited widely, winning acclaim and becoming a full member of the Society of American Graphic Artists. In 2011, she was honored with a 30-year retrospective as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Akron Arts Alliance.

Pink Peonies

To continue the idea of these flower images as portraits, here Rogers has arranged her three “sitters” in frontal, ¾, and profile views as the foremost petals of each flower advance toward us in bright white-pink highlights. The large, multi-petalled heads interest us with their richly complex forms and shades of the pink-purple hue. There is something almost ghostly about this triple portrait, as the blooms float against the deep shadows of the ground, where their stems have all but disappeared.

White Mum and Freesias

Rogers began her career as an artist by working in etching and aquatint, “attracted to the … process because of its textural qualities, its qualities of transparency and its possibilities for great contrasts.” In this digitally-recorded and -printed image, we can appreciate the subtleties of transparency since the artist limited her palette to the whites of the blooms -- some of which have very fine yellow and pink features — and the unmodulated green of the stems and leaves. The mum fans out its petals in triumphant profile, their dense regularity emphasized when a couple of them deviate from that regularity. This strong, white, repetitive form dominates the composition and contrasts with the stem of freesias at right: This latter seems to float up from the inky depths and open out to us as the bright stamens in the center of each bloom uncurl, framed by pink-veined petals. And note that the unopened buds deep in the picture at the top advance to opening and opened blossoms in its midst, while the lowest blossoms on the stem are already collapsing and desiccating — a tiny life-cycle depicted on a single stalk.