Featured Artist| Mary Hickey

Mary Hickey is an Irish artist who received her B.A.(Hons) in Fine Art and Painting from the Limerick School of Art and Design. She works with watercolours, acrylics, and oil paints. Her portfolio is very diverse and contains high contrasting  work which focuses on abstract forms and movement, to soft works of realism and paintings from life.

“By abstracting the forms I try to create a sense of mood, atmosphere and beauty. Sometimes the compositions are suspended in negative space, and sometimes they create their own landscapes. The work developed from a process of staining. I started the process of staining paper and canvas, watercolour and later watered down acrylics became a great medium for this, by pouring pools of water and then injecting paint into the pools. As the water evaporates the pigment leaves patterns of sediment, sometimes forming organic branching arrangements.

Painting watercolours entails a collaboration of the artist with a living medium that they cannot control or erase. Watercolour or watered down acrylic will flow, settle, blend, separate and invent on its own before it dries. It bears a resemblance to the unpredictable flow of nature.”