Featured Artist of the month

Each month we feature one artist from our Community Artists page here on our website, in our monthly newsletter, on Instagram, and on Facebook. We will also host an artist’s talk with them over Zoom so our audience can get to know them better. Check back at the beginning of each month for a new artist to learn about. And view artists from past months here.

January 2026: Mary Wallman

We are happy to present Mary Wallman as our Featured Artist of January 2026. Read on to learn about Mary’s experience with the Leo Marchutz School of Painting & Drawing and to see a selection of her artwork.

Artist Statement

I am 72 years old and I have drawn and painted since I can remember but I was never introduced to working from observation or encouraged to do it until I came to the Leo Marchutz School of Painting & Drawing in September of 1973. It was not a popular thing in the late 60s and early 70s and I heard all the time how unoriginal and uncreative it was to work from life. How could it be called art? I arrived in Aix scared of everything and rather depressed, and everything about the school was different from what I knew and both inviting and engaging. The location was beautiful, the teachers were solicitous, and what we were asked to do was challenging. I was hooked. Not only did I connect with the content of what was being taught but I opened up in ways I did not think were possible and my aims and outlook shifted.

I knew while I was in Aix that first year that painting, and working from observation in particular, was what I would do for the rest of my life, but I did not commit to making it my vocation until many years later. And when I made that choice, it was not because painting was the thing I did best or the only thing I wanted to do but because it seemed to me the best way for me to learn what I wanted to learn. Paying attention to the world around me and responding to it by interpreting it visually has influenced everything I have done in my life. Being alone in a studio with only my subject and my thoughts has kept me as honest as I know how to be. Working from life is like a practical philosophy—it requires that you call on all of your faculties and abilities and in response it changes both what you decide to do and how you make decisions. Sure, you learn about light and value contrast and scale but you also learn what finished looks like, how to keep at it when you would rather stop, how to be more patient, and how to speed up. And then you can apply all that to everything you do outside the studio. It seeps into everything because it affects how you approach solving problems.

I lived in Aix for two years and then returned twice to the LMSP&D for the summer, first in 1986 and then again last summer (2025). While in the US I attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture the summer of 1980, got an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, and taught college level art classes for 30 years at various schools in the Philadelphia area. I was member of the Gross McCleaf gallery in Philadelphia from 1988 until 2022 and was a member of the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City from 1992 until 2002 and had ten one-person shows between 1994 and 2008. Now that I am no longer affiliated with a gallery I do whatever I want to, as small as I like, in whatever material I want to work in.

I started out painting large figures in oils but ended up doing mostly landscapes in oil and soft pastels. At first they were also rather large, but these days most of my work is quite small. I have chosen to show you pieces that are representative of what I was doing at the time with dates attached. Some of these images come from pieces I made 50 years ago and others I did last week. It is hard to select a few from so many.

- Mary Wallman, January 2026