#CIDLoveLetters: Mary Jean Gilman
Artist Bio
I was born in what was at the time the small logging town of Missoula, Montana. I’ve lived in Seattle for a long time now, so that I consider myself a dual citizen of Montana and Washington. My professional practice is in horticulture and landscape architecture. Personal interests are painting and drawing, learning about and understanding cultures of the world and the diversity that is our community. I also enjoy gardening and growing plants from seed.
Artist Statement
I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil. This urge has guided my entire life. For me, drawing is about creating a dynamic two-dimensional surface with interesting value changes. I consider drawing the best way of observing anything, and as a superior memory device for experiences. I’ve filled 25 sketchbooks with sketches of places that mainly no longer exist, razed in the relentless march of “urban renewal”. I also love to sketch places when I am traveling. I fell in love with watercolors about twenty years ago. The way colors flow on the paper through the brush from my hand fascinates me. For me, painting is less about recording an experience and more about conveying the emotional tone of a place or imagined experience. The main question for me is: how, as an artist, can I express the emotions I have about the inequalities of our times, without surrendering to negativity, anger and hopelessness? The COVID 19 pandemic has brought this into sharp focus for me. RESILIENCE: There is much that disturbs me about life in the modern world: the disparities among different groups—quality of life, personal prospects, prosperity, life expectancy, access to health care and nutrition, to name a few. The relentless threat to treasured cultural symbols and community life is especially egregious. Greed and systematic bias play ever-growing roles, favoring the wealthy few at the cost of the welfare of many, and reshaping our surroundings so as to be unrecognizable. In this context, resiliency means much more than “bouncing back” from difficulties into the same ill-fitting garments of the past. To me, resiliency means stretching oneself to comprehend issues from a global, 360-degree perspective. With empathy, people, and by extension realities, can be transformed, bringing fairness and justice. Resiliency enables people to envision new communal realities and invent creative solutions to correct historic wrongs. This line of thought leads me to a new way of thinking about my artistic subject matter. Rather than restating familiar tropes of Western culture, I search for images that bring a renewed view of global problems. Because I love the C-I D, it is the setting for most of my paintings. I employ some symbols more familiar to Eastern cultures, combining elements in unexpected ways. Analyzing the context of these disparate symbols placed in the same image is thought-provoking. Adjacency can lead the viewer to question why they are together and to think creatively. For example, one piece illustrates the Bing Kung Association building in a future where climate change has produced rising sea levels. The building itself is a melting iceberg, hinting at the origin of this neighborhood in the tide flats. Such a future for the C-I D neighborhood could be seen as tragic. Beloved cultural locations are in ruin--and we know change threatens to destroy what remains, whether by climatic or commercial means. Yet in the foreground, a dragonfly (sign of rebirth) rests calmly on a blade of grass, suggesting that nature will prevail and a new reality will be achieved. Destructive forces are a constant throughout, and even pre-dating, human culture. Always, humans struggle against these forces. Studying the rise and fall of cultures shows that creative resilience in confronting and conquering disease, inequality and calamity is the one critical quality that can bring humanity together.