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About Rona
Philadelphia native, Rona Fisher has been an artist since childhood. And she comes by it honestly: her mother, Sylvia, is a painter who taught art in the Philadelphia public school system for many years. In junior high art, Rona’s class was given an assignment to make a collage using magazine clippings. Rona’s piece was so advanced—instead of pasting phrases and photographs onto the board, she used tiny bits of dark and light paper from the magazine to make a piece that depicted three human heads in stark shadow and light—that she got in trouble with her art teacher, who accused her of getting help at home. Shadow and light continued to be a theme for her as she moved on to oil painting.
Rona graduated from University of the Arts (formerly Philadelphia College of Art) in 1980 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting. In both her representational and abstract work, she was finely attuned to the use of positive and negative space. This attention to detail is evident in her three-dimensional work: wearable jewelry in precious metals.
After leaving Philadelphia for San Francisco in the early 1980s, Rona discovered the crafts movement, and began to experiment with other media. She worked in stained glass for many months. One day she took some small pieces of leftover glass and made them into earrings. Not long after that, Rona picked up a piece of silver. It was as if she had discovered a whole new world.
This world widened in the late 1980s when, while living in Munich, Germany, she began working in gold. Rona discovered an as-yet untapped love of goldsmithing. This was an artistic turning point for her; she has been making jewelry ever since. When she returned to the States in 1991, Rona established Rona Fisher Jewelry Design in Philadelphia. She began doing Sugarloaf shows in 1997, and has been a regular at many of the shows ever since.
Over the years Rona’s collection has developed and grown. She creates new designs on a regular basis, and custom work is now a mainstay of her business.
In 2005, Rona and her 4-member team moved the business from an artists’ loft building to Philadelphia's Jewelers' Row, the nation's oldest diamond district. Here they have a third-floor a showroom that looks into the workshop. The showroom is open every Saturday when Rona is not on the road doing a show, as well as by appointment. Visit Rona at a Sugarloaf show, online, or at her showroom!
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