Mary Hart was born in 1960 in Connecticut.  Her childhood experiences were shaped by her mother’s training in the natural sciences, particularly botany and geology.  Hart’s mature work is known for its close observation of natural forms.  She earned her MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College where she was the recipient of the Elaine de Kooning scholarship in Painting.  Hart has lived and worked in Portland, Maine since the 1980’s.

Hart’s early work was influenced by Cezanne and Monet with their emphasis on direct and spontaneous recording of daily life and their practice of plein aire painting. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1982 with an honors degree in English and Art and awards in poetry and painting, Hart traveled and painted the landscape in California, Greece, England and Maine.  Her direction shifted while spending a year as a Reynolds Scholar studying at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London.  During this time she discovered the work of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, and began to look closely at Georgia O’Keeffe.  She read widely from women writers and critics, especially Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Griselda Pollack and Lucy Lippard.  These writers challenged Hart’s traditional training in art and supported a more personal and emotional exploration in her work.  On her return to the United States, Hart settled in the western mountains of Maine and pursued a series of projects that sought to balance extended observation of the natural world with an inward turning emotional intensity.  Alfred Stieglitz’s concept of Equivalents had a direct impact on her first two major series of work:  a body of large gestural paintings of the pine forest near her home, and a group of paintings and sculptural reliefs made during a year spent observing the paper mill in Rumford, Maine.  Hart’s work from this period was exhibited at the Dean Velentgas Gallery in Portland and at the University of Maine Art Gallery in Farmington.  Following this time of intense productivity, Hart spent two months at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs.

Yaddo brought a period of reflection and focused studio work.  Another Yaddo resident, art critic Suzi Gablik, was writing and reading aloud chapters from The Re-enchantment of Art, reinforcing a step Hart was taking in her work.  For the first time, she began to paint from inner imagery, discarding the direct tie to the landscape.  Her work continued to use materials from the landscape, such as dirt and leaves, but the symbolic structure of the work was more purely abstract.  She exhibited these pieces at the Dean Velentgas Gallery in Maine and was included in many group shows throughout New England.  At Yaddo, Hart also met the artist, Adele Cohen, who became a lifelong friend.  Cohen’s work, abstract paintings and sculptures, recently exhibited in a retrospective at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York, is notable for its brooding emotion and powerful draftsmanship.  Cohen mentored Hart, sharing her knowledge of the art process and her frustrations and successes as a woman artist.  In a letter written in 1992, she chided Hart, saying “It took you a long time to find out you must not think too much about painting…You end up doing the work in your head.  If the “gut” and emotion are there—experience and dexterity will (should) let you do it.  If it doesn’t work, do another one.”

In 1993, Hart completed her MFA in painting at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.  A multi-disciplinary program, Bard brought Hart in contact with artists involved in a wide range of visual media, as well as writers and composers.  Hart worked directly with painter Alan Cote, and painter/critic, Steven Westfall.  Other visitors to her studio included the poets, Ann Lauterbach and Robert Kelly, filmmaker Peter Hutton and sculptor, Petah Coyne.  This was a time of ferment for Hart after her relatively quiet years in Maine.  Her work leaped from idea to idea.  Questions were raised that she has been answering ever since.  Following graduate school, Hart turned to printmaking, joining Peregrine Press in Maine in 1995.  Working in monotype allowed Hart to synthesize imagery from a wide variety of sources, melding old life room sketches with samplings from the natural world.  Imagery returned to her work, but the associations between images were now more lyrical, less defined by a landscape reality.  During this time, Hart met and married her husband, the artist and designer, C. Michael Lewis.  Their son, Mica, was born in 1996.

As Hart’s use of imagery became more specific in the late 1990’s, she returned to painting in oils on polished wood panels.  Dealing with issues of fertility, damage, struggle and beauty, Hart’s work continues to link the natural world with an inner narrative.  Her small, sometimes miniature paintings are intensely focused and detailed but their larger purpose is the formation of visual associations that describe the artist’s place in the world and her emotional response to it.  This work has been exhibited at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Maine since 2000.  Her paintings have been included in exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art and Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York, and she has had solo shows at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College and the University Of Maine Museum Of Art in Bangor.  Hart’s work is currently in the collection of the Portland Museum of Art, Simmons College, the University of Maine, Southern Maine Community College, Bates College and numerous private collectors.  She received an Artist’s Resource Trust Grant in 2006, a Good Idea Grant in 2007 and was artist-in-residence at SMCC in 2007-08.  Mary Hart is currently at work on a series of paired paintings called, “Lexicon,” which will be on view at Aucocisco Gallery in May 2009.

March 2009