Maryann Lucas

Soften My Heart

2022

Maryann Lucas lives and works in Sag Harbor. She is primarily self-taught but has also received instruction and support from wonderful and generous members of the East End artistic community. Working exclusively in oils, Lucas sets out almost daily to create plein air landscapes and seascapes. In her studio, she works directly from life and captures the beauty of natural light as it transforms ordinary objects into visual delights. Lucas wants her work to celebrate all that is well with this world and brilliant in this life, despite its pockets of darkness. “For me,” she says, “I know I am in the presence of something beautiful, when it steals my breath, silences my mind, pushes out everything else and draws me in. I trust that. I use that to guide my hands as I arrange a still life or scan a landscape to determine where to set down my easel. Ultimately, that is what drives me to paint.” Becoming evermore skilled as an oil painter is another of Lucas's goals. To that end she remains teachable, finding it refreshing and vital for her growth to paint with others. She has studied with favorite artists including Michael Klein, Dennis Perrin, Ben Fenske, Melissa Franklin Sanchez and Ramiro Sanchez, and the late Jack Riggio, a prominent local artist from Southampton, New York. Lucas has taken classes at the Victor D’Amico Art Institute in Amagansett, New York, and the Art Students League in New York, New York. She earned her B.A. from Georgetown University and her masters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.