Time has been running away again. No blog in so long! So let me begin again with my friend Joan Danziger’s show at Osuna Art in Bethesda. The very well attended opening was a few weeks ago on April 12 – Ramón Osuna’s gallery had outdone itself in the way the sculptures were lit – and Michael Sullivan has already reviewed the show in the Washington Post on Friday, May 2. Can I say more than he already did? Well, I have three advantages, not that they make me an expert, but still: I know Joan a bit, I own one of her sculptures and I got a copy of the catalogue that was published at the same time her show opened.

I met Joan in the street, in 2001, right after 9/11. I had just moved from South Africa to DC and was somewhat forlornly walking my dog when I caught sight of a house with near the front door a very large, colorful, weird sculpture with all manner of animals climbing up a pole . That house became a favorite stop on my daily dogspeditions. Then one day a smiling young man came out of the driveway. I asked him if he was the owner of the sculpture, but he shook his head, laughed heartily and said he was merely the studio assistant of the owner and the sculptor, Joan Danziger.

One of the mothers in my child’s new school said the next day: “Joan Danziger? Quite famous. Has works in museums and all that. Bit of a recluse, though, doesn’t talk to anyone, very grumpy type. Everybody in the neighborhood knows of her, but nobody knows her.”

The stuff of fairy tales! I could not be more enticed to wanting to know her. One of the next times I walked by, I again met the studio assistant, whose name was Alan, and this time he was followed by Joan Danziger herself. “Who is THAT?” she barked to Alan, over my head. “She’s your neighbor, sort of,” said the always smiling Alan, also over my head. “What’s your name!” she barked again, now to me. I was getting really nervous now; there is a difference between hearing about a Very Grumpy And Reclusive Famous Sculptor and actually meeting her at a moment of when she is being Very Grumpy and Reclusive. In a small voice I stated my name, and told her about our housewarming party, like it made total sense to do so, and she answered, “Fine, send me an invite,” also like that made any sense. Then, with an abrupt “Goodbye”, she was gone.

I did send her an invite and she did come and we had a lot of fun; she was neither grumpy nor reclusive which just goes to show how rumor gets into the world, right on the back of a horse named Nonsense, and she sold us a sculpture a while later and there where lots of parties over the years as well as tragedies she rarely talks about, and to say the least, I’ve never regretted the day I came to admire that sculpture in front of her house. I am sure that the tree in my latest painting “Paradise Lost” is channeling a Joan tree, although I didn’t do that on purpose, and if I did, well, imitation is the highest form of flattery, isn’t it? But maybe it is that she and I own the same tree book.

And now to her show at Osuna. Before it, Joan’s later work had already become considerably smaller in size and left behind its colors, the whimsical circus creatures, the musical animals, the human-animal hybrids. Her animals shrank and retreated into her forests, their colors fading into the grey of her increasingly ghostly trees. Of the human-animal hybrids only some remained, mostly the bird woman, but she, too, became small and even more mysterious.

This is even more so the case in Joan’s show at Osuna Art, but with a difference - read on. There are cats and birds, a griffin, a deer, and many, many, many charging horses, some with women riders. I am not sure if they hadn't been there before, these horses and their riders, but I certainly saw them appear after Joan’s accident (2003), about which a bit more later, when she couldn’t sculpt and took up painting instead, producing small, intense canvases, mostly in dark blues and reds, of mysterious horses and Amazon-like riders charging around and into dark trees.

There were two rhinoceroses, one a small mythical creature in one of the enchanted forests (Suspended Garden), the other, a lone stand-out in the collection, a huge creature all on its own (The Rhino Is A Tree ... The Tree Is A Rhino), straddled, no, infested, by a tree. She or he and the tree look ancient, they mirror each other, they feed on one another, they look like one single magnificent and strangely symmetrical creature that has lived since the beginning of times and will live on forever.

Apart from the rhino, though, the trees in Joan’s show reign supreme. Their roots have become more twisted and intricate, their branches thicker and more gnarled – at first sight they look older than they used to. The underlying metal armatures are often partly or completely exposed but rather than confirming that the trees would have aged and are falling apart, it makes them look younger, rejuvenated. They have cast off, literally, a cast of clay, or refused to receive one; there they stand now, shining and elegant, ephemeral (not a usual Joan epithet), mysterious in an entirely different way.

But that is only part of the developments in Joan’s fabled forests, because many of her trees now also are in bloom. Next to a number of Joan's familiar grey ghost trees, and next to the new and different skeletal metal ones, a second new generation of trees has grown, still covered in cellu-clay, but blooming in exuberant oranges, reds and yellows, while two have burst forth in showers of dazzling white petals. The casting off on the one hand and the blossoming on the other hand are much like the Joan that emerged from the 2003 car crash that wrecked her body as well that of others as well as life as she new it: here is the same Joan, but slightly different, alive once again, as strongly attached to life as the rhino is to the tree, with all her amazing imagination and sensitivity intact and brimming with new and different sculpted stories and enigmas.

Alan was in that car. Alan was at the opening of the show, in a wheelchair, still smiling.

Joan Danziger: Mythic Landscape - Recent Sculptures at Osuna Art, 7200 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, MD 20814 - 301-654-4500 - through June 21.