Maryann Lucas

Uprising

2019

A still life from the masterful still-life artist, Maryann Lucas. Artist Bio 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 aire 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 goals. To that end she remains teachable, finding it refreshing and vital for her own growth to paint with others. She has studied with favorite artists including Michael Klein...

An oil painting of farm-fresh goods laid on a table with a plaid picnic-print tablecloth. 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 aire 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 goals. To that end she remains teachable, finding it refreshing and vital for her own growth to paint with others. She has studied with favorite artists including Michael Klein...

My floral paintings consider the same elements as when painting an abstract painting. I put paint on the canvas and push and pull with the paint: addressing value, color, shape and m...

Calvert’s current paintings investigate the relationship between digital media and the reception and perception of images, and utilizes diverse technologies such as fresco, 3D modeling, AI and data manipulation through code. She is especially interested in the evolution of pictorial space. Today we view our screens and the world they occupy as a shallowly layered space of overlapping desktop windows. The picture plane has tilted up again from the flatbed to float in front of our eyes. Calvert’s paintings in turn depict an intermediate space, where the verticality of the still life paintings cohabitate with these digital panes. Dutch floral still life paintings encapsulate multiple concerns. Their subjects were botanical fantasies, emblems of an economic mirage that has contemporary corollaries. Most important to Calvert’s pictorial concerns, they depict ephemeral things in shallow and diagrammatic space - they are all foreground. They contain an abundance of visual information in overwhelming density, creating an allover resolution; a visual field that is equivalent to digital noise. By making painterly interventions into reproductions, Calvert attempts to dissolve the layer between the resolution of the source image and abstraction of the painted mark. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Tiffany Calvert has exhibited her work in the US and abroad including Lawrimore Project in Seattle, E.TAY Gallery in New York, the Speed Museum in Louisville and Cadogan Contemporary in London. Residencies include the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park, and ArtOmi International Arts Center where she received a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship. Calvert has received grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her work was recently profiled by critic John Yau in the online journal Hyperallergic. Her curatorial projects include “Some Abstraction Occurs” at 65GRAND Gallery in Chicago and “Magic” at Mercer College (featuring work by Chris Martin, Karla Knight, and Sarah Peters...