Artist Lecture #5: Mary Scurlock

I got the luck of going to visiting lecturer Mary Scurlock at Page Bond Gallery. I have a great obsession with trees and that is her main source of imagery. The reason that she decided to use trees is because it is a metaphor for her personally. A couple of years ago she needed to get surgery on her leg. When she went to see the doctor, they mention how “one leg feels like glass, one feels like wood.” She saw this as a good metaphor for things that happen in our lives and decided that a tree was a good choice for imagery for this.

When making her paintings, it is an evolving process. She works in mixed media. Scurlock builds up about 5 layers of gesso and then continuously digs into it. She then uses oil paint and wax, which tends to take away some of the oil paint. She carried her old style of using writing in her paper paintings to using it in her panel paintings, which she mentioned is just a good aesthetic. Scurlock states that she “doesn’t want her images to be super realistic. A memory is a good way to put it.”

Scurlock mentioned when asked about the point of view of the trees she has painted that she “wanted there to be a depth to the trees and that is why she picked that point of view.” He work is defiantly more about the process but it is also a conscious, formal decision for every mark that she makes on her panels.

When asked about her scale of her images, I couldn’t help but disagree with another viewer who said they wanted to see them large. I feel like that petite size of her panels if perfect for all of the intricate details that are seen throughout. I feel like if they were too much larger they would be overwhelming. Scurlock mentioned how incredibly times consuming these images are and that they might be too much if done in a larger size.

My favorite image of her that was shown tonight was one that was at the back of the gallery. Most of her tree images were done in a very neutral, cool color pallet but this image was done darker. I instantly fell right in love with it because the color is more engaging. I really enjoy her other images but I just could not stay away from this one. It is her latest work and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.