Artist Mary Spencer talks about Magritte

This is the second in a series of occasional blog posts, where we've asked a member artist to talk briefly about an artist who's profoundly influenced their work. 

Magritte has entranced me for much of my life. I first saw his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, when I attended the Art Students League during a summer college break.

Rene Magritte, Le Double Secret,  1927; Musee National d’art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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This painting, Le Double Secret, seen much later at the Pompidou Museum in Paris is an example of what I love. There are two female images, a wooden ‘balcony’ edge and the sea/sky behind them. The primary female face has split open to reveal a vocal chord of bells, the shifted cover face is to the left. Somehow secret music has cracked open a twin, a double. It is a very mysterious, haunting, edge oriented painting of inner space and facades.

Since I have a twin, this resonates! We have a secret: we present it differently. We are both very introspective lovers of the sea and sky. Life’s horizon always shifts to produce far off sounds.                 

-Mary Spencer

and now, a bit about Mary....

Mary Spencer, Kimberley Woman,
mixed media on panel.

Mary Spencer's recent series of paintings combine mixed media with oils on panel, bringing together fragments from cave drawing, news photos, architectural views, landscapes, folding the elements over themselves and one another to achieve intriguing and enigmatic visions, a unified world of disparate parts. Prehistoric cave drawings traced in dark winding lines untainted by steel edge or digital concept blend into stone mountains or fragments left by wind, water, fire. Her paintings refernece Bernard Rudofsky’s The Prodigious Builders. All life is a building contest that  can astonish and remain. MORE info...