Contact Information Mary Hart @ Aucocisco Gallery E~Mail: maryhart@maine.rr.com

Mary Hart grew up in a small, rural town in western Connecticut.  She passed much of her childhood exploring the acres of open land around her home, closely observing the habits and features of the natural world.  Summer vacations were spent on a lake in Maine, where her ancestors had been summer visitors since the beginning of the 1900's.  This early and close relationship to nature has shaped her mature artistic work.

Hart graduated from Dartmouth College in 1982, with a BA in Art and English and awards in both poetry and painting.  After college she won a prestigious Reynolds Scholarship and spent a year studying at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, and traveling in Europe.  On her return, after a brief stint in Boston, she settled in Rumford, Maine.  While supporting herself as a teacher in the public schools, she painted and had her first solo exhibition in 1988 at the Dean Velentgas Gallery in Portland.  This was followed by a one-woman show at the University of Maine in Farmington of paintings based on the paper mill in Rumford, and another solo show with Velentgas in 1989.  In 1988, Hart spent two very prolific months at Yaddo, an artists' colony in New York State.

In 1994, Hart earned her MFA from Bard College where she was awarded the Elaine de Kooning Scholarship in painting. She worked closely with painting instructors, Stephen Westfall and Alan Cote, among many others.  On her return to Maine she became a member of Peregrine Press, an artists' printmaking studio in Portland. She began to explore monoprinting and has been combining printmaking and painting for the past six years.

Hart's work has been exhibited widely in Maine and New England, most recently in a solo show at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland in 2004 and in the New Acquisitions exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art in 2005.  She is currently represented by Aucocisco Gallery.  Hart maintains a studio in the Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook and lives in Portland with her husband and son.

In her own words:

My current focus on the landscape has allowed me to return to the subject that inspired my move to Maine twenty years ago.  Then, I painted large, loose, moody views of the woods and sky.  Now the paintings are very small.  In their compression, I am seeking a new intimacy and intensity of feeling.  I also have a renewed interest in the craft of painting, and a basic fatigue with art that is all ideas, but has no physical presence.  The sensual pleasure of seeing a painting that is beautifully made is integral to my work.  As I do the labor necessary to achieve the meticulous realism of my images, I fall into a type of meditation out of which grows a deeper relationship with my subject.

Wizened, 2000 Oil on Board, 6"w X 7 1/2"h {framed} NFS

Breaking Up, 2003 Oil on panel ~ 3"w X 3 3/8"h $	Wishbone Oil on panel ~ $

Disturbance, 2003 Oil on panel ~ 3 3/8"h X 2 1/2"w $900.00	Eruption Oil on panel ~ $

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