Where Experience Becomes Color
Orange sweeps through blue and gray in Mary E Morgan’s Sitting In The Noonday Sun. Curving lines gather and loosen, while pale passages offer moments of light within the painting’s restless movement. The image feels full of experience, allowing color to hold what words might leave unfinished.
Mary’s paintings trace the landscapes of her inner and outer life. Memory, nature, family, significant events, and faith enter a practice shaped by both conscious intention and subconscious discovery. Meaning can arrive through the act of painting itself, revealing something she recognizes fully only when the work is complete.
A Life Open to Other Worlds
Mary grew up in Fort Worth, lived in Colombia as a girl, and spent her senior year of high school in Zurich. At the International School there, she took her first art class. Encounters with different cultures deepened her love of people and places, while life in Europe strengthened her interest in art and artists.
She earned her BA from Baylor University in 1972 and her MA from Texas Woman’s University in 2002. Across thirty years of teaching art, including at university level, she shared that curiosity with others. Following retirement, she devoted her time to painting, continuing a creative journey that has included exhibitions in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, New York City, and Istanbul.
Paintings That Reach Beyond the Surface
Mary works across watercolor, acrylic, oil, and printmaking, exploring canvas, paper, and wood. Her relief works give this search a sculptural dimension. In Adoration, shaped canvas and collage rise from a supporting canvas, creating folds, shadows, and a sense of movement that changes with the viewer’s position.
Hope Lives, made with oil and oil pastel, offers a different kind of expansion. Green, pink, and pale yellow mingle with energetic lines, suggesting a world continually finding room to grow. The title provides an emotional entry point while the abstraction leaves each encounter personal.
Community remains central to Mary’s philosophy. She values spaces where diverse people feel welcome and believes art connects us through shared visual experience. Her paintings carry that generosity into an intimate exchange: an invitation to pause, feel, and discover how another person’s creative journey might illuminate our own.
Contact the artist: maryemorganart.com
More artists: Margot McMahon: The Living World Within Our Reach · Shu-ya Hsu: Painting the Joy of Belonging · Submit your work to ArtTour International
