Mary Wendel
Mary grew up in the hill country outside of San Antonio, and moved to Austin about six years ago. She has been creating art for as long as she can remember. At a young age she had the opportunity to work with an Amazing art mentor, Mack Hamilton Stewart, who got her started in oil painting. Since then she is constantly exploring new ideas and absorbing as much knowledge about art as she possibly can. When she is not painting she is usually out riding her horse, Windy, cuddling her cats, Margot and Domino, or swing dancing. She created this series to illustrate an in-between human emotion, a middle area between moving forward and moving from the past. She likes her paintings to give her a feeling of calmness with a bit of discomfort. To do this she sometimes include something wrapped around the character’s body or face resembling a security blanket. Then she throws them, vulnerable, somewhere out of place in this world. In some paintings like Fuel Island and Laridae, her characters visit vast places with an intense force, like a huge tidal wave, or a storm approaching that might change everything in a split second.
In other works like Moth, or Echinoidea, perhaps the storm has already
come, leaving the characters in a dark hole to adapt and grow. Along with faces, hands are one of her favorite things to paint; they are beautiful yet grotesque structures that completely change form with a turn of the wrist. She sometimes paint hands like she’s molding clay, puzzling chunks and ribbons of paint together, giving them an older and used look compared to other areas of the paintings.
In this series of works she uses oil paint on canvas. She has been working with oil for about sixteen years and it’s still her medium of choice. The meaning behind her paintings is usually subconscious until months after she finishes the piece- their reactions and ways her viewers relate her paintings to their own lives helps mold understanding behind the scene she was compelled to paint.
