| Mary Spain | ||
| Birth Date: 1934 |
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| Death Date: 1983 Artist Gallery |
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| "Exactly when Mary Spain tumbled into her pictorial looking glass world is difficult to determine, she may have been born there." This was written by Roger Hurlburt, art critic for the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel. Mary herself said. "You know, I love painting more than Baskin-Robbins ice cream."
A woman who came to live in Solon, Ohio, teaching at Chagrin Falls High School, making art was as necessary as breathing. The content of her paintings, drawings and small sculptures proceeded from one to the next spontaneously, as if it is just waiting inside of her to be defined. Perhaps redefined might be a better word because her enigmatic imagery rings with timeless familiarity. Dolls and animals, people and puppets, signs and symbols inhabit an airless plane somewhere just beyond reality but within our ken.
Her junky figures with their mismatched eyes, animals with human qualities and the moons in their airless skies are out of familiar lore, mysticism and ancient wisdom. We respond because somewhere some way, we have met them before, but her art seems simplistic.
Spain brings to mind the faceless gentlemen in derbies painted by French surrealist Rene Magritte. She probably was a surrealist at heart, drawing images from the dream world and the psyche.
Mary Spain, who died of cancer in 1983 at the age of 49, would seem to have an affinity to gifted female artist Eva Hesse. Like Hesse, who died of a brain tumor, she was abruptly robbed of a brilliant career.
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