 |
 |
 |
Mary Winter was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1943. As an only child, she spent many quiet hours in her room drawing and designing clothes. Her fine arts experience began in Jr. High School when with the encouragement of her art teacher she won a Gold Key award for one of her drawings. She started attending Layton School of Art at night while still in High School and upon graduation she majored in Fine Art there. After two and a half years life took many twists and turns and she lived a well traveled life all the while studying the masters in the museums of Europe and the Americas. While living in Las Vegas, Nevada for 22 years and juggling a career in Casino Marketing, her main medium was watercolor and she was an accomplished and award winning signature member of the NV Water Color Society.
In 2006, Mary and her husband Elliott moved away from the career pressures and social mandates to a rural life in La Cienega just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico which has given her the opportunity to immerse herself in her passion of painting.
While many of Mary´ works are inspired by the people and places of her travels, her more recent works have drawn on her reaction to literally touching the earth of New Mexico. While hiking the trails or working in the garden she is always drawing on the sensations of the earth and its changing seasons, light and colors. It is with the light touch of a brush or the thick paint of a knife that she uses to capture the gentleness of a flower or the coarseness of a winter vine. Her boldly colorful paintings capture the mood, light and memories of her travels and the people who cross her path.
"Living in New Mexico is opening my senses to nature. I feel so much more in touch with my surroundings. The changing seasons, the ever moving, sometimes harsh weather, the dynamic sky, the emerging flowers are all new to me each day. This constant movement of nature is changing my way of painting. It´s making me more curious, more open to the, what if?"
"I consider myself a student and my process is evolving as I work more. I work mostly in oil on canvass. I start out a painting very loosely with thin colors that softly blend the darks and lights. Once I get the basic shapes defined, I like to play around with the paint. That´s when I pick up my knife. I build up layers of really juicy paint. I like to mix colors on the palette and then load several of them on to my knife and see how they melt together on the canvass as I push and pull them around. Sometimes I scrape them off and see how they mesh into the thin layers. Sometimes my work is frustrating and challenging but there are more of those moments when it is getting to be fun. When I accomplish that thing that I saw that drew me to paint something."