Since earliest memory, I have been looking out windows. I’m not even sure why, but the landscape has always been a visual beckoner, inviting me out beyond the walls. From the corn rows of my childhood which converged on the furthest field line, to the atmospheric valleys just before the horizon, vistas have lifted my sight plane from where my feet were grounded. I’ve long understood that any creative production for me needed to have a conceptual basis, but in grad school I came back to a realization that the landscape was indeed an important prompt into the bigger themes that have captivated my head and my heart. I can do realistic simulations, but I’ve found more satisfaction in glimpses and gesture than in any carefully rendered copies. The glimpses are a tease, a taste only, like a lovely appetizer before a coming banquet. To me, glimpses suggest the ineffable, they suggest more, they get closer to things that are real-er than anything tangibly in front of us now. What is most real I don’t think can be contained nor copied. But I might be able to touch the edges of it.

And here in brief summary is the root of my conceptual motivation: When I was in college, shattered after the death of a close friend, I started paying attention to the life-giving words of Jesus. I then heard a lecture on the visions of Isaiah, the ancient Hebrew prophet. He was indeed an outward thinker, a landscaper with words. And what he laid out is the overall grand plan as God weaves through the valleys of history. Isaiah saw Jesus clearly on the horizon, hundreds of years before He arrived. I was hooked; and that was only the beginning. The entire collection we call the Bible is a visual progression in time, echoing the same. Everything I make has been saturated by how my life has been changed by God’s good hope and His faithful promise that more, much more is coming. I sensed this somehow out my windows early on. Now I know beauty’s name.

Read and view Mary’s Master of Fine Arts thesis here.