Artist Lecture - Mary Scurlock

Mary Scurlock presented her work at the Page Bond Gallery on November 17. Her series consisted of mixed media (including gesso, oil and wax) renderings of trees on wood panel. She explained that she had worked on paper for about 25 years and recently started working on panel. While she was dealing with a hip surgery, she began debating on whether to work on paper or panel; during one visit, her doctor mentioned that one leg felt like glass and the other like wood. She felt that was an apt metaphor and concreted her decision to work with panel.

She wanted the trees in this series to be intuitive like her past work, which is more abstract:

(Loll, mixed media on paper, 2007)

The trees were primarily leafless; she mentioned that she worried leaves would be too hokey and how those who visited her in her studio while she was creating these found it depressing. When there are leaves present, they are very subtle, which I think was a good decision. The coloring in each piece varies. She said there is no sequence to the series, though it was towards the end of working on them that she started using a darker palette. I was more drawn to those pieces and felt they held the most emotion. What I liked most in the imagery was her subtle use of text. Whenever I do mixed media work, I am hopelessly compelled to layer in print I've copied from various texts or blend my own writing somewhere into the piece. I have often been told not to do this, so it was refreshing to see it done well by Scurlock. It was included in every piece and I didn't even notice it until I spent more time looking at one in particular.

She says that in the future she would like to experiment with the medium more and possibly start working bigger. I would be interested to see how this work progresses and how it would look at a larger scale.