About the Artist

ABOUT MARY

Mary is an abstract artist based in Southeastern Wisconsin along the Lake Michigan shore. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, Mary has formed a career full of creativity and joy. She has been on a journey through her art that has taken her in many creative directions including painting, fiber art, apparel design, photography, video, and especially teaching.  She is incredibly grateful that she has had the opportunity to follow the paths that have opened to her through her art and to share her joy of creativity through her teaching.  Opening the lives of others to a deeper connection to their creative selves is something that brings much joy to her journey.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I create artworks that express my love for the land, especially wild spaces, in an intuitive style utilizing painting, photography, and video. My sensitivity to color and nuance has led me to express this love of nature through seeing with a quiet eye, a way to discern atmospheric shifts in color, texture, and shape with deep sensitivity. My use of abstraction encourages the viewer to see deeply through the surface, beyond the physical realm, to experience the artwork through the heart and spirit.

My paintings are never planned prior to beginning. What comes through each piece is a combination of gathered visual inspiration from nature, remembered life experiences, and the feelings that remain long after an experience has passed.

Trees, the forest, shorelines and waterways, and the changing light of the sky feature heavily as abstract subject matter in my mixed media artworks. I play with the contrasts between liminal and littoral space to create subtle shifts in meaning in an ethereal style meant to open the viewer to their own interpretation of meaning.

I work in a variety of media including oil, cold wax, pastel, inks, earth and mineral pigments, and acrylic paints and mediums. I often include collage elements in my works created from my photography and digital art. Brushes are rarely used. Non-traditional tools such as squeegees, trowels, brayers, palette knives, and handmade tools are used for their abilities to create textures and marks that reveal layers hidden deep within each painting.

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