Mary Elmer-DeWitt
Untitled 11 Acrylic, paper and ink on canvas 20 x 20 inches 2023
Mary Elmer-DeWitt
Bio:
Mary Elmer-DeWitt is a native New Yorker who currently lives in Brooklyn. She has been a
professor in Pratt Institute’s Art and Design Education Department since 2004. Before painting she worked for many years as a freelance photographer and studied at the International Center for Photography with Edward Keating and Eva Rubinstein, among others. Her photographs appeared in Time Magazine and the New York Times and were licensed through Nonstock, a fine art stock agency. She began painting in 2008 and has studied privately with NYC painters Molly Herman and Chris Wright. She was a Vermont Studio Center resident in 2014 and is a member of Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists group.
Artist’s Statement:
My painting process begins with play and improvisation; I put down materials–pencil, crayon, pastel, ink, collage papers, fabric, paint and pigment sticks–and remove them, building and scraping, sometimes getting quite lost, until a passage appears that intrigues me and invites me to build upon it. As I develop the painting, I may reference natural forms, objects or landscape, but my interest in color is most often the driving force. I am thrilled to come upon two muted colors sitting side by side shimmering in one another’s company. Recently I have been incorporating decorative rollers from the 1950s into my process. I like the contrast between the fine regular marks these tools produce and the denser, less controlled marks of the brush and palette knife. And I enjoy the flattening effect the patterns have as they sit scrim-like on the surface or are glimpsed between sheer or opaque planes of color.