Provides journal entries, poems and beautiful blue wash sketches which chronicles the progression of author's friend, Rosemary, toward death.
Notes:
Review, Network Winter/Spring 2004: ‘Suite: A succession of movements in dance style,’ so begins Barnwell’s tribute to her friend Rosemary who died of breast cancer at the age of 49. The Rosemary Suite is thus a death dance, told in a succession of journal entries, poems and beautiful blue wash sketches, as the author chronicles Rosemary’s progression -- painful, slow, and broken movement -- toward death, her last dance. Yet, The Rosemary Suite is also a dance of life, a celebration of Rosemary’s strength and resiliency, told in love and wonder for living. Leslie Barnwell met Rosemary Hauswirth as part of her drawing group, where Rosemary was a model. For nearly 10 years Rosemary posed for Leslie as Leslie recorded in minimal lines, the fluid, raw and intense beauty of Rosemary’s form. The Rosemary Suite chronicles a decade of graphic intimacy between artist and model – as each makes herself vulnerable, model to the artist, artist to the blank page, toward creation in art, or, as Barnwell states, toward “the passion that fuels it all.” Leslie and Rosemary continued their sketching sessions, even during the breast cancer and failed treatments, and so Barnwell is able to share with the reader Rosemary’s form in the vibrancy of life, the pain of sickness and dying, and even in the moments after death, as Leslie, in a final tribute to Rosemary, sketches her body in death. Interspersed between these incredibly moving portraits, Barnwell shares her personal thoughts on Rosemary’s life and dying, and their relationship as artist and model, and inevitably, as close friends. So, while The Rosemary Suite is a touching tribute in poetry and art to Rosemary’s dance with death and with living, it also sketches the passion of creation that comes from the dance of friendship in art. This book is a wonder. Quite simply, magnificent.
