People - Nature - Art with Mary Brooking

Description

Painter Mary Brooking celebrates what she sees in nature and aims to create spaces that interact with human senses on a primitive level and test the balance between reality and abstraction. She employs reduction rather than embellishment, distilling elemental truths about the places she paints through interactive color, texture and form.
Brooking will be online with the Wendell Gilley Museum on Tuesday, May 16, as the museum’s People-Nature-Art presenter in an online-only program that begins at 7 p.m. There is no fee to attend, but registration is required. Sign up at www.wendellgilleymuseum.org/calendar to reserve your spot.
Most, but not all, of her work is inspired by Maine landscapes. She works exclusively in acrylics, and the nature of the paint itself affects her work. “Acrylic paint as a medium forces immediacy in speed and execution, which fits my style and temperament,” she says. “I use many layers of paint, often obliterating elements as the painting progresses, challenging myself always to distill and reduce the image to its exact essence and nothing more.”
She will discuss her process, inspiration, evolution as an artist, and connection to the Maine landscape in an conversation with museum director Sean Charette. After earning a Bachelor in Fine Art with a concentration in paining from Hiram College in 1978, she became a nationally award-winning magazine designer based in Cleveland, Ohio. She and her family moved to Maine in 1997 and five years later they settled in Westbrook where she still lives and works. Brooking’s paintings are collections in the United States, Canada, France and New Zealand.  She has exhibited widely in Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Ohio and New Mexico, and exhibits regularly at Casco Bay Artisans in Portland, Maine and Art 3 Gallery in Manchester, New Hampshire. 
This monthly series brings artists, writers, carvers, and creative types of all kinds to the Gilley to explore how nature and art interact in their work, and how their art impacts their own approach nature. Each session for 2023 is sponsored by our friends at Bar Harbor Bank & Trust.