Mary Blue is an artist living and working in North Norfolk. She paints, works in art education and runs classes for professional and amateur artists.
Mary Blue received her Master of Fine Art in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 where she studied with renowned landscape painter, Neil Welliver. Visiting artist critiques such as Bill Jacklin, Harmony Hammond and Red Grooms were often in the studios. Additionally, she studied at the Vermont Studio, the Maryland Art Institute, and Ecole des Arts d’Avignon France. Her work is exhibited widely in galleries along the Norfolk coast, in London, and abroad. She exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2023 and also is regularly shortlisted for the Sir John Hurt Art Prize. Mary is an artist educator whose workshops delight and inspire the young and young at heart. Most summers you can find her sketching in her favourite dune at Wells Next the Sea. Her work is represented by Abbott & Holder, Gallery East and with Contemporary & Country in Norfolk and other regional East Anglian galleries and in the USA. She has travelled widely, is a playful adventurer with an insatiable curiosity about the universe that feeds her work as an artist.
Artist Statement
During an artist residency in St. Agnes on the Isles of Scilly, I spent a blissful day on the most perfect remote sunny beach, with a white seal pup for company. It felt like we were both waiting patiently for his mum to return from hunting. Quietly, deeply, I felt a universal truth, a feeling connected to everything. When confronted with the vastness, I looked to the rock pools to ground me, inspired by a friend's framed painting by EQ Nicholson depicting a woodland rock study. I was seeking an objective reality that holds true across all contexts, cultures, and times, serving as an interconnected part of a larger whole. It was a unifying thread that stitched me to something so vast reminding us all that we are part of something greater. In North Norfolk, this truth appears in the saltmarsh and high-tides. Everything waits in time, seeing sunlight as well as the shadow.
Regardless of subject matter my work revolves around the power of nature, and the fleetingness of time. My evocative paintings invite a deeper look reflecting upon the impermanence of life and the forces of nature. I paint brilliant light and deep shadow, the far horizon and the passing of time. I am drawn to the delicate, the broken, and the most fleeting, echoing TS Eliots Four Quartets which delves into themes of time, purpose, fragility and meaning. I like to encourage the viewer to feel themselves a part of the landscape. I am drawn to the delicate, the broken, the underdog, these are timeless motifs and possess a powerful resonance.
