“I have been involved with art all of my life…making it as a child, studying art and art history in college, earning a graduate degree in art therapy, and teaching it. My ongoing practice of taiji and qigong has increased my experiencing of flow and creativity. With this has come an awareness of the seamless connection between the energy in nature and the universe and within myself.

My prints invite looking and thinking on many levels. Nature changes from day to day, season to season, and we are in synchronicity with this. Some of my images seem to have one “best way” they want to be printed. Others look just right in a variety of different colors and orientations with no one way seeming superior. The leaves I choose as I walk outside are always perfect: sometimes perfectly balanced, sometimes perfect in their “imperfection” as they reveal decay from seasonal change or disease or holes from hungry insects. I think they are beautiful in all of their forms and I try to print the plates to reveal this. Sometimes an individual leaf seems to embody the wisdom of the entire universe. In other prints it’s the relationship between the leaves, how I compose them, that elicits the flow of associations.

I love the excitement of the process of soft ground etching, where real leaf juice leaves its essence in the etching plate, and chance and nature and the press and intuition together give birth to the image. Sometimes the leaf etchings are simply leaves; other times the images capture an essence densely evocative.

We humans are nature. We share the same energy of the universe. Sometimes leaves remind us of body with its organs, veins and cells. Sometimes they remind us of the variety found in landscape with it’s waterways and branches. They mirror our strength, fragility, complexity, beauty, and transitory nature. We are all part of the mystery and majesty of the universe. My leaf images embody this awe and remind us how fortunate we are to be alive in this abundance.”

-Rona Satten-