Mary Walker has been a painter and printmaker for many years. She taught high school math for several years, which she enjoyed, then decided to turn to art full time. Mary was born in New York and grew up in North Carolina. She started painting in 1975, while living in New York and studied at the Art Students League with Isaac Soyer. After moving to Charleston, she continued to study painting and printmaking for several years at the College of Charleston. The last few years she has traveled to Italy to work and vacation.

Walker’s images are narrative, but not realistic, figurative, but not photographic. She is interested in trying to tell a story, or translate a theme or story into paint. She is drawn to the age-old stories- Greek myths, opera stories, and Shakespeare.

            Lese Corrigan

Mary Walker’s works might best be understood as Whimsical-Realism , an implementation of conservative portraiture extended beyond its usual bounds by imaginative flourishes reminiscent of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Her art develops within a standard oeuvre and expands into an almost archetypically personal waking dream, thereby re-stitching the schism that developed between Reason and Imagination resulting from the Enlightenment and its heritage.

Walker blends what H.W. Janson sites as two of the three main currents in early Twentieth Century painting: Abstraction’s concern with the formal structure of a work, and Fantasy’s exploration of the imagination, particularly through a quality of spontaneous emotion. The result is an original style with strong subconscious familiarity that engages both the intellect and the psyche.

Matthew S. Carlos

Summer, 2003