by Bella Erakko
Alliance Art Gallery member artist Mary Ann Brinkley cannot take a walk in the woods or even her back yard without reveling in the beauty of nature. As the featured member artist, visitors will have the opportunity to see how nature has influenced her work from initial oil paintings done thirty years ago to today’s artwork where she integrates actual elements from nature into art. “I began with a painter-sized spatula, using oils,” Mary Ann remembers. “I was just beginning and exploring. My grandmother inspired me. She lived in Colorado and painted into her eighties. She lived with us for a couple years, and I have several of her paintings.”
Following her grandmother’s landscape love, Mary Ann finds joy in so many aspects of nature from a slight sapling growing between boulders to the freeing beauty of lakes nestled in mountain ranges. Her other love is children and animals—a school bus on an autumn day, a child playing a flute for a cat, a rooster cockily crossing a stream. But recently, her natural attraction to nature drew her to fellow member wood artist Drew Suttor’s and his wood shavings. They were both exhibiting in Quincy. He had set up his tables with his lathed bowls and vases, decorating them with shavings, that to Mary Ann looked like flowers. Wondering about possibilities, she asked for—and he happily gave—a bunch of these shavings. To her delight, these shavings came in rich colors, even exotic-wood red.
Today, she explores three-dimensional abstract creations using shavings, twigs found in her own yard, and even glass fragments. Her newly emerging creations range from very abstract, where the natural elements become the invitation, to realism, where she incorporates selected pieces into landscape scenes. One recent piece shows willowy twigs from her back yard with blue-painted shavings shown as fragile flowers. It feels as though one has stumbled across a singularly rare and beautiful flower on a mountaintop meadow. With Drew’s abundance of wood shavings, and Mary Ann’s imagination, Second Saturday visitors will have the opportunity to see creativity at work … in a new way.
An opening reception will be held Saturday, November 9, from 5:00 until 8:00 pm. A piece of Mary Ann’s work will be given away in a free drawing held at 6:00. This reception coincides with Hannibal’s Second Saturday Gallery Night.
