Roz Leibowitz Artist's Statement
My work is influenced by the Romantic sensibility in the truest sense of that term: I believe that there is a Spirit that moves the heart and hand, and, without such a Spirit, a work is dead, just as without the hand, the Spirit is silenced. I believe in the panentheistic universe of Blake and Boehme, that things have Souls, that history is alive in a scrap of paper, that great cities have whirlwinds within, and that the dead behind us show us the steps ahead.
I believe in the power of mothers and grandmothers, women before my own time, who kept their hands busy and their eyes wide open. I believe in this Busy Work, that it is the hum of the universe, a Serene Repetition left mark by mark. I trust in the redemptive power of Ecstasies, those I have felt and those I await.
My background is in history and literature. I worked as a librarian and have the librarian’s eye for the plain eccentric fact. All of my drawings are collaborations with the past. I delight in memory, small and neat, life compressed into a single page. Please have a look, but look straight through. There is no looking above, no looking below. Look straight through.