A Breakthrough in Seeing

A few of years ago, I took some of my postcards to an art class, where, working quickly and freely, I copied some Marys on to ColorAid papers. I liked the results. I had found a direction for The Mary Project.

I knew I was going to paint a lot of Marys and I wanted to paint them on a sturdy material so I decided to use small canvas boards which I first painted very bright colors, like the colors of the paper. I hadn’t analyzed it at the time, but now I see that I have actually painted the Marys on post card sized boards, 4 x 6.

At first, I painted from whatever postcard I randomly chose at any given moment. As I completed more and more small Mary paintings, I laid them out to see how they looked together. I knew that I wanted the images to flow and to have Mary’s gestures coordinate from one to the next. The famous artists had painted the various hand positions and body gestures so beautifully that I found myself thinking of this as a “dance “, Mary’s Annunciation Dance.