Artist of the month MARY THOMAS

I trained as a teacher more years ago than I care to remember and then taught art in secondary schools until the opportunity arose to semi retire and teach in Adult Education.

This led me to sign up to a part time degree course at Winchester School of Art so that I felt I could stay one step ahead of my students.

My work has been quite wide ranging, from painting to ceramics to collage and construction. My painting is usually landscape based but often abstracted. I pick up bits of the  landscape I find myself in; stones, shells, bits of wood, and these lead me to a painting which doesn’t “look like” the landscape but describes the essence and atmosphere of what I see and what I feel about it. “Redell Beach” and “Up Beat” are examples of this. “Glasgow Dreams” was painted after seeing the work of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and “Head of a Girl” from a moving model. Sometimes I need a change from the intellectual process of abstraction so I just paint what I see, as in “Egg”.