Mary Graham was born in New York City,
and began formal art education at the High School of Music and Art and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Additional studies in scene painting and stage design at the Lester Polakov Studio in New York led to a career as a designer and scenic artist in New York theater, opera, ballet, and on Broadway. She studied oil painting, artistic anatomy and figure drawing at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, and the Art Student’s League, studying with David Leffel and Robert Beverly Hale. After moving to New Hampshire in 1987, she studied painting with John Bott at Colby Sawyer College, and completed a BFA in Painting at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2007. Currently living in rural New Hampshire, her recent work has focused on landscape, primarily of the northeastern wilderness. In 2008, she was awarded a month-long artist’s residency in Dinan, France by Les Amis de La Grande Vigne, and has also painted extensively in Provence, Tuscany, England and Ireland. Her work is in corporate and private collections and has been included in numerous shows throughout New England.
I make art as a way to explore space and to find meaning in the encounter with the “otherness” of nature. Painting and drawing make this experience of relationship tangible. I paint to participate in the creation of spaces with the power to take us somewhere else and create sanctuary in our lives.
I feel the landscape to be deeply inhabited,
a living place embodied by living things in the changing cycles of life.
In the words of the poet Novalis,
“Every landscape is an ideal body for a particular kind of spirit”.
I have no need to imitate or romanticize nature, or to use nature as a screen onto which I project an emotion, a story, a spiritual idea, or a political message. My work invites the release of concepts in favor of an experience of the senses, an opportunity not to escape the world but to reconnect with what is real.
-Mary Graham
©M. Graham 2012