Mary Kenealy

For over the last twenty years Mary Kenealy’s work has been primarily executed in watercolor on paper. Her watercolor technique involves the laying down of multiple transparent dark-colored washes onto an opaque bright color. The light color is exposed by lifting the dark washes with a wet brush. Essentially, she delineates form with water. Kenealy centers a circular form that is derived from the face of a vintage General Electric kitchen clock that resembles a stylized flower shape. Each hour’s arc is a “petal”. For the drawing inside this form the artist silhouettes a combination of small, found, discarded objects from the street, such as soda can pull tabs, plastic toys and exploded gun caps—and inexpensive purchased items including key chain charms, bubble wands, sewing thread and costume jewelry, combining the lost with the purposely found. The images generated often have the look of photograms or prints because of a shallow depth of field and the strong illusion of light from behind.

The artist is drawn to symmetrical and geometric composition as it references nature on both a fundamental and symbolic level, allowing for multiple variations such as those found in a flower genus, like Primula that has multiple and varied species. Although often referencing flowers, the series of paintings, A Few Seconds of Now, are far from botanical illustration as they are not visual representations of nature, but rather subjective abstractions that use repetitive, man-made and organic forms to create a small scale, self-contained time encapsulated world that was the artist’s “now”.

Mary Kenealy (b. 1953, San Pedro, CA) lives and works in Norwalk, Connecticut. She has a B.F.A (1974) from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art (1977). Kenealy’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, and the Nelson Atkins Art Gallery, Kansas City, MO. She has been the recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Kenealy has worked extensively in the arts as a college educator and museum professional.