maryGrace

ABOUT THE ARTIST

I grew up in Marshall, Texas and graduated with a BFA from SMU. One of my first employment positions was as a designer for The Drawing Board in Dallas. When The Drawing Board contracted to use Jim Henson’s Muppets, I was one of the artists using the Sesame Street licensed characters on greeting cards. This circumstance introduced me to The New York Stationery Show and Children’s Television Workshop. I free lanced for them for 25+ years. That amazing adventure was a spring board into illustrating books and games for major Industry conglomerates like Random House, Simon and Schuster, Western Publishing, McMillan, Mattel, Fisher Price, and Milton Bradley. That opportunity resulted in over a hundred published books and games not only with licensed characters, but a chance to create a family of whimsical peeps of my own development. Many of them went on to become licensed themselves and represented major product Brands and National Corporate promotional images. I feel extremely fortunate to have had a successful, rewarding, and lucrative career as a Children’s Book Illustrator.

Since retiring in 2010, I am exploring an ambitious redirection into mixed media painting, primarily oil. I am attending outstanding instructional and inspirational workshops across the country. I work tirelessly in my studios in Dallas and Colorado. With boundless enthusiasm at my age, the only restriction is time. I find it impossible to retire that rewarding sense of artistic discovery I am blessed to celebrate with JOY every day.

I want my art to continue to tell imaginative stories, but this time it needs to express more than the adventures of whimsical critters in serendipitous situations. I want my subjects to mirror an expressive, soulful narrative symbolic enough for individual interpretation, but subtle enough to unleash thoughtful perspectives, opinions, and recollections. My work is a reflective insight shaped by a lifetime of memories and experiences written in a language varying in situational mood and atmosphere. I want to investigate and expose the diversities of the human spirit designated by the beauty and emotion that surrounds me. I hope to evolve into a painter that is on a poetic path to a synergy of scenic exploration, abstract definition, distinct color amalgamation, a strong design aesthetic, compositional freedom, and contemplative connection.