Mary Elmer-DeWitt

Email : medewitt@mac.com

Website: www.maryelmerdewitt.com

Instagram: medewitt11

My paintings emerge from a process that begins with play; 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 a painting evolves, I may reference natural forms 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 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.
Mary Elmer-DeWitt is a native New Yorker who currently lives in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of NYU (BA) and Pratt Institute (MA) where she has been a professor in the Art and Design Education Department since 2004. She has studied with NYC painters Molly Herman and Chris Wright and in 2014 was a Vermont Studio Center resident. Her work has been exhibited at the Dance Theater Workshop, Spoke the Hub Re-Creation center, Edward Hopper House, and MS Rezny Gallery