Poultry Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

Drawn to nature and Greek mythology, Marcia Scanlon works with mixed media on paper to layer, connect, and reanimate ancient stories. Her works are well-rooted in literature, inspired, in part, by Homer’s Odyssey, Sappho’s poetry, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as Baudelaire’s Convergences, and Joyce’s Ulysses. Her revisiting of these stories, coupled with her own lived experiences, creates a unique literary syncretism rooted in science, nature and the artist's materials themselves as her watercolor images of upstate flora and fauna are compellingly set against Mendeleev’s Period Table of Elements. Scanlon received her MFA in painting from the University of Minnesota and has had numerous international solo and group shows. Her work is in museum and corporate collections, such as The Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Weisman Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, and the House of Arts and Letters, Larnaca, Cyprus to name a few. Currently, she works in studios in Soho and rural upstate New York. Artist Statement on Mendeleev’s Dream Series: This series starts with the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras in the 5th Century BCE. Anaxagoras described the world as a primary brew of undying elements, whose material variations were never caused by an absolute presence of one element, but rather by that element’s dominance over the others. “Each one is… most manifestly those things of which there are the most in it.” He introduced the concept of Nous (Cosmic Mind) as an ordering force that dislodged and separated out the variations from the original, nearly uniform brew. Anaxagoras’s concept of undying, omnipresent elements moves me deeply. What a genius and good guesser. Next comes Mendeleev. I look for ways of connecting my regard for ancient Greek mythology and thought to our present day, so I was enchanted by Mendeleev’s dream, in which the vision of the periodic table of elements...

Small and endearing French watercolor of several hens beside a well in a colorful farm yard, circa 1900. Original one-of-a-kind vintage work of art on paper displayed on a white ma...