Multicolored Roses Painting

Mary’s mother was an artist and handed her colored pencils when she was young enough to crawl under the table to make sure she got her grandmother’s legs and feet right on the paper. She did oils after marriage when her children were very young but they woke up and she had to put it all away. She has been painting seriously since 1994 in Santa Barbara, CA. She fell in love with watercolor and mastered it. She then took up oil monotypes and collage. She enjoys figure painting. After viewing Mary’s abstracts her teacher Thomas Van Stein, encouraged her to do abstracts. Her paintings are regularly on display in Santa Barbara County including the Mayor’s Office, Ridley Tree Museum, Westmont, U.C.S.B. faculty lounge and Women’s Center, City College Small Image Show, Faulkner Gallery, Casa now Vision, Kate School, Karpeless Manuscript Library. Art Walk, Channing Peake Gallery, Cabrillio Inn and Bacccara Hotel (both A.A.C. and Scape shows) and recently the Distinctive Art Gallery. Her monotype is on the S.B. Printmaker’s website and displayed in art groups such as Abstract Art Collective. Mary has branched out to show in the Administration Building in Ventura and Dab Art Gallery as well as President Reagan’s one hundred year old birthday celebration at the Next Picture Show Gallery in Dixon, Ill, and at the Leopold Schepp Foundation gala on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan. Mary has had half a dozen one woman shows including the Santa Barbara Conference and Visitor’s Bureau, Sansum Diabetes Institute, and Alta Vista Foundation. Her patrons include a number of states in the U.S. as well as England. Mary has an M.F.A. from Columbia University School of the Arts and studies regularly with visiting artists in Santa Barbara. The latest workshop she took was with Peter Bradley. She has also studied with Skip Lawrence, Gerald Bromer, Robert Buridge and Ruth Armetage. Joseph Woodward, Art Critique of the Santa Barbara New Press, called Mary “a California artist” and praised her painting of surfers. “Sweeping washes of blue and white paint are freely flung in a way verging on abstraction, as if she is trying to capture the spirit as much as the actuality of water in a big wave.”