Artist Statement – Underwater Encounter is an iconic image of a humorous look at the Battle of the Sexes. It is created from acrylic paint on canvas with much instantaneous feeling and thought; the style is appropriated from the cartoon style of Roy Lichtenstein. This style, I thought is well used as a funny image showing an angelic image of a man overleaping an over-sized women who has possibly bent over to avoid him. The nudity of a swimming in water scene is drawn in an simple playful way as it is not to be taken seriously.
Not the Glass Ceiling maybe as you might say, but the status of women as an underling has grown well from the icons drawn of Alley Oop, and King Kong.
Biography – Mary has been painting since the age of 14. She graduated from Boston University’s School of Fine Arts, Southern CT College, Yale’s Summer Program, and the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. She has worked as a preK-12 teacher of art and special education in Bridgeport, CT and Baltimore, MD. She has also been a City Spirit Artist for the City of New Haven, CT. Her past exhibitions include New Haven Open Studios, New Haven, CT, Kaleidoscope Gallery, Erector Square Open Studios, Baltimore, MD. She was a past member of Artist Housing Inc. Gallery 48 in Baltimore.
During the past three years, she has explored the symbols and simplicity inherent in the drawings of children, and have appropriated them into her paintings. Her paintings are gestural and figurative but also at times abstract. She uses direct a la prima technique, applying paint quickly and intuitively.
Her most recent paintings are portraiture. Self-portraits are usually different in likeliness to each other, and display a variety of human feelings. She chooses colors specifically and chromatically to tessellate in special areas between the foreground and the background, in order to render form without shadow and light. This technique is done by matching colors together according to how they relate and appear optically. She then tries to incorporate simple figuration into the context.