Mary Barrett first studied drawing and painting as a child, taking Saturday morning art classes with Joyce Hyam in the early 1960s. For a long period, practical art took second place to raising a family and a career in the public sector and academia. Since 1996, Mary has taken various weekend and longer-term drawing and painting workshops on the Sunshine Coast with various tutors including Lyn Cran and Brian Allison. She has been enrolled at the Brisbane Institute of Art since mid-2001, studying painting and drawing in various media with David Paulson, Margaret Frederickson, Hollie and Sally L’Estrange. She is a regular participant in student exhibitions at the Brisbane Institute of Art. In July 2003 Mary took two intensive week-long painting workshops with Jean-Maxime Relange and Pierre Cayol at the Moulin de Perrot school of painting near Valence in France. This is her first solo exhibition. Artist StatementI am attracted to the excitement and energy of the modest, ordinary things around me, so I never need to go more than about 10 meters to find something I would be interested in painting. I can remember standing in the supermarket gazing at a large cabbage and knowing I would have to paint a cabbage soon. A cabbage is a whole system – a real visual feast. Just look at the life in it. Cauliflowers and capsicums have the same effect on me. I like to leave my subjects around the house and live with them for a while until they make themselves part of my world. They then let me know what I should do with them in a painting. The perspectives in my paintings aren’t the result of careful arranging. Usually they result from my looking at my subjects over a period of time and simply considering the rhythms and relationships they develop in relation to the other things lying close to them. So my paintings are parts of real life – they’re lived. The subjects of my paintings may be modest, everyday things, but they have vibrant, colourful personalities. They’re not shy, that’s for sure.
Artist StatementI am attracted to the excitement and energy of the modest, ordinary things around me, so I never need to go more than about 10 meters to find something I would be interested in painting. I can remember standing in the supermarket gazing at a large cabbage and knowing I would have to paint a cabbage soon. A cabbage is a whole system – a real visual feast. Just look at the life in it. Cauliflowers and capsicums have the same effect on me. I like to leave my subjects around the house and live with them for a while until they make themselves part of my world. They then let me know what I should do with them in a painting. The perspectives in my paintings aren’t the result of careful arranging. Usually they result from my looking at my subjects over a period of time and simply considering the rhythms and relationships they develop in relation to the other things lying close to them. So my paintings are parts of real life – they’re lived. The subjects of my paintings may be modest, everyday things, but they have vibrant, colourful personalities. They’re not shy, that’s for sure.