As well as an artist, you're also an art historian. When did you first discover your passion for art?

It feels like I’ve always been interested in art. I come from a family of engineers, my parents are petroleum engineers, and my twin sister and older brother are both mechanical engineers, but my grandma is a sculptor. We joke that it skipped a generation, my mom was the engineering black-sheep in her family, and I’m the art black-sheep in mine. I remember being maybe 7 or 8 on holiday, and bringing my mom a sketch of a lemon blossom and hearing real surprise in her voice when she said “Wow! That’s incredible, did you do this just now?” That I could save some of what was special about an already wilting flower and have it last forever felt like magic. There’s really something about making art - pouring your time and attention into the creation of a thing which wouldn’t have existed without you. There's an aspect of preservation in both art and history, saving a bit of now to experience later. I almost feel like my interests in creating art and studying history were two separate branches that then grafted together in university. An incredible high school history teacher showed me that the past is not some world apart, but that then was once a very real now. It was the first time I had considered just how much more depth that was to history. By the time it came to think about university, I was already interested in art, but nowhere near confident enough to commit to what felt like a risky career. So I went into a double-major of art history and medieval history. While there I found the confidence to pursue art, and went right back to an undergraduate degree in art school!

Throughout your life studying art history, which artist has fascinated you the most? Have they had an influence on your own artwork?

Oh man, too many to choose! I loved learning about Vermeer, and the solidity of the Dutch Golden Age when everyday life became worth memorializing, and brand new lenses suddenly changed how we thought about seeing. I loved Raeburn with the drama and the intensity of the Romantics. My absolute favorites, however, are Sargent, Bouguereau and Paxton - each so different from each other, but each so beautiful! The light, the forms, the emotion - so perfect. Sargent can paint light out of nothing, and make it look easy doing it. Turning the whitest satin into a panoply of color with just the juiciest, most effortless brushstrokes. Bouguereau paints the most life-like skin I’ve ever seen in person, solving the questions of light and form and yet somehow still pre-dating the Munsell color system. Paxton, whose own love of Vermeer is so beautifully apparent, has such a beautiful quiet in his works. His works make the most mundane feel so graceful.

Art history is also alive and well - some of my contemporary heroes are Mia Bergeron, Quang Ho, Zoey Frank and Jeremy Miranda. It’s probably no coincidence that many of them routinely exhibit near my hometown in Colorado, as I’m sure seeing their work at Gallery 1261 made some formative impressions on my taste. I like to think they have all had quite an influence on my work, but I’m still waiting impatiently for my technical skills to catch up to the proficiency I see theirs.The right color, with the right value, the right edge, and in just the right spot to look effortless.

What initially drew you to portraiture? What interests you about the human form?

I finally dipped a toe into portraiture with only 3 semesters left of art school, but I’m so grateful I did! I spent a spring semester with a professor whose method of portraiture finally made sense to me, and come my senior year I had wholeheartedly committed to it. Even before art school at SVA, during weekly life drawing with the St. Andrews Art Society, I’ve been drawn to figurative work. Figures are endlessly fascinating, and beautiful. People make such incredible anchors for participating in, and inserting ourselves into a work. We imagine ourselves in the same context as the figure, or BEING the figure, or recalling a time when we felt a similar emotion. We’re so wired to look for people in art, that finding faces in abstract shapes even has its own name (pareidolia).We want to see reflections of our own experiences, and windows into the experiences of others. 'Human figures in art elicit such empathy, even if it is such a difficult discipline, I feel it’s absolutely the most rewarding.

Thinking about your portraits, which facial feature do you think is the most challenging, and why?

Mouths - hands down. Whether it’s teeth curving away and disappearing, or the soft delineation between where lip fades into skin, or how the corner of a mouth might tuck up and into the muscle of the cheek in a smile . I think we read a lot of our emotional cues from the eyes and the mouth, but eyes have got nice clear edges to their shapes, and always come together a little easier for me. Mouths and chins though, they’re wildly different each and every time. They come with so many pitfalls too - paint the line between the teeth just one value too dark, and suddenly those teeth are scary and threatening. Get that back tooth one brush-width too big, and suddenly it seems to have warped the sitter's whole jaw. Don’t get me started on facial hair - the upper lip and chin on my bearded sitters must be the most repainted sections of any of my portraits. The skin goes cooler, but the hair is actually warm toned and might even have highlights and shadows of their own separate from those of the face underneath. Above all, these details still have to remain soft, or a scouring-pad-chin ends up the most eye-catchingly sharp detail of the whole face. I think a lot of likeness lives in the proportions, but personality and expression lives in the mouths.

In your artist statement, you state how important the representation of light is in your work. Why is light an important aspect to you and your work?

Light, 9 times out of 10, is where my inspiration for a painting starts from. The warm glow from through a sheer curtain, the cavernous dark behind a crisply lit square of cathedral floor. The intensifying of the green through leaves. I find myself constantly taking pictures of times where light has made something ordinary feel important. Cold lighting can feel clean, and warm lighting can feel comforting without anything physical being changed. It's such an individual experience too, just a magic trick of perception, telling us about texture and distance and transparency. I love a cheek that seems to be a cool lilac only because there's a warm yellow light nearby. The cheek is always flesh colored, but in that specific context it seems to be something else. Painting feels like its own microcosm of that same magic trick - a 2d patch of color that seems to be the handle of a metal pitcher in a dim room. It’s the color, quality, and behavior of the light that anticipates the experience without ever touching it. A painting is and seems to be in the same way that light is and can seem to be.

What initially inspired you to paint 'Gilesgate Sunset'. Describe your process for creating it from start to finish. Why do you think this piece has been so successful in achieving multiple awards and recognition from galleries such as the prestigious; Mall Galleries?

My process on this one started with a run club. I was out in early spring and the sun was setting right as we’re starting. We had just come up the hill to the claypath roundabout, and the sun was just zinging down the road! From the pastel greens to the black of the bins, all of this color had transformed into these hot orange and yellows. The rhythm of the chimney’s silhouettes against the sky - the final house in the row’s pink so perfectly echoing the clouds, and it became just a magical little moment. I just had to stop and take a few pictures because it was too beautiful to miss. I find myself taking pictures of magic light all the time, but very few make it all the way to a painting, and I knew this one was special because I started the painting off right away - It had come after quite a long stretch of tricky commissions, so it was a lovely shaking out to have all the pressure off, and to be able to play with wild bright colors on this tiny little board. I think perhaps I was still supposed to be working on other things, and working on this painting felt like stealing time for myself. What started as joyful procrastination began to really look special, so I recommitted to getting the windows all sat correctly in space, and reined back in some control of the value space to really make that sun feel as bright and glowy as it did that evening.

I’ve been honored at the reaction it’s received. A neighbor I was talking to afterward said she couldn't believe that here in Durham could feel so much like the riviera. How she had never noticed how beautiful something that seemed ordinary to her was. It won the People’s Choice Award and the Tony Harrison Memorial Award at the North of England Art Club’s Annual Exhibition, and then just a month or so later it was accepted into the Mall Galleries and it won the Ronald Morgan Memorial Award! Since even before moving to the UK, getting any work at all accepted into one of the Royal Society shows was a goal of mine, and I can’t believe I’ve managed it so soon! It was an out-of-body experience hearing my name at that crowded, intense opening night.

Who has been your favourite sitter to paint, and why? Who would your dream sitter be?

My husband Brian has been, and continues to be, my favorite sitter. I can’t take full credit for his modeling skill, his sister started photography young, so he already had quite a bit of practice posing and taking direction before he was doing it for me. The obvious answer of why is because I love him, but a more specific answer is because he has this sense of ease in front of a camera. So many of us (me absolutely included) get a wave of tension and anxiety when someone points a lens our way. We get self-conscious and focus internally, freezing our limbs, and tightening our faces. Do you ever notice in travel photos, how the first blurry candid somehow has more life than the 3rd or 4th? Yes, now everyone is looking towards you and not blinking, but some of the magic of the moment has gone. The genuine smiles have soured towards staged grimaces. Brian has always been a favorite model of mine because he can adjust an angle or a pose without losing the relaxed confidence of a candid. He’s also up for shenanigans, including balancing on a fence post to get his head framed in the branches just right, pretending with 100% commitment that the door he’s opening has the most incredible thing on the other side, or that he’s just heard a spooky sound behind him at night. I have a life-long series I’m working on, where each year I paint a new portrait of him specifically to set aside. Down the line, I want to have a retrospective with 60+ portraits in a row all of Brian. He’ll get older in each piece, but I’ll also mature and grow as an artist - and like putting a pin in a ticket stub, each painting is a snapshot of us in that year. Even from the first one six years ago, there is so much change it’s incredible - I can't wait to see the difference when it’s been 10 times as long. I don’t even know who my dream model might be - every new painting I start feels like maybe this is the one. Often it’s the people I love most because I want to show them how beautiful I see them. Sometimes though, I catch myself out in public planning how I would paint perfect strangers, so perhaps my current dream model is that LNER employee with the incredible profile down at Durham station who I may eventually work up the nerve to ask to pose for me.

How do you picture your work evolving in the future?

I have no idea, which is nerve-wracking and quite exciting. The art historian in me predicts tides of interests, each building on the next, with an overall trend towards catering less and less to what I think other people want. But - journey before destination - I’m always painting towards my own artistic taste, and that’s something which grows and changes slowly, and resists being forced. I took a class recently which I loved, and the artist was talking about her own phases of painting. First, really subtle, neutral colors, then intentionally intensifying her color, then interest in flattening perspectives, then in exaggerated scale - each of which felt like a completely logical step from one to the next even though her paintings now are completely different from what they were a decade ago. I feel a pressure to evolve all at once, right now, into a totally contemporary, totally weird, 100% brand new style - as if the beauty is in the novelty. But I keep coming back to what if the beauty was in the real, in the now, in the everyday. If there's something I see in my heroes, that I aspire to be more like - it's the confidence to get in 2 or 3 brushstrokes what might take me 6 in ever-closer overcorrections. But I think that evolution is just practice and more practice. Right now I’m thrilled with how each new work solves an interesting problem, and suggests a new problem to answer with the next painting. I’m always trying to push myself to work on something I think might be tricky, but at least a few times a year, I try to expressly paint something outside of my usual visual tastes. Sometimes I hate it, and sometimes I love it, either way it widens my comfort zone. At the end of last year it was an incredibly high-key (and quite textured, both of which are quite unusual for me) self portrait with neon pink that I ended up loving. Right now it’s a very interesting experiment with reflecting and flipping cells within a face, dissolving some elements into abstracted patterns and colors, and seeing how little information has to be solid for it to still read as a whole. Jury’s still out on if it’s a revelation, but I will be glad I've pushed at that boundary regardless. Gotta chase away the “woulda, coulda, shouldas” with that “one little did”.

Why do you think art is important in society?

I think art is as important as we make it. I think art and society are such an enmeshed thing - one is made in reaction to and as a result of the other. It's something we can't help but make, and whether as expression, aspiration, or remembrance - it's inevitable. As long as we have society, we will have art.

Mary McClure

ARTIST INTERVIEW - Mary McClure