Every so often and not nearly often enough, someone comes along who can transform everything they touch into a work of art.

Seemingly without effort, without hesitation, without thought, these living creative sparks constitute a Renaissance unto themselves.  They can be sensed from miles away and traced down by triangulating the extent to which the outlying provinces are made beautiful.  For our generation, Mary Rose embodies this ethereal archetype. Almost larger than life, she lives on an island in northern Lake Michigan, behind the Toy Museum she designed and built and in which she displays her wares, past the pottery garden, past the two hundred species of roses gathered from near and far, in a towering handmade studio whose every nook and cranny embodies one or another of her diverse talents: painting, drawing, printmaking, carving, casting, making jewelry, blending herbs and oils, or predicting the future.  This is her domain on Beaver Island, the hub of her aesthetic vibrations, the nexus of her spinning of straw and paper and wood into gold.