Testimonials

Then Shall We Truly Dance

"This is a strong painting with powerful ancestry from Egon Schiele to Timothy Hawkesworth. The expressive gestures, subtle color and strong composition are enhanced by the wobbly paper surface. A well presented, professional piece of art."

First Prize

Maxine Krinsky Manges
Juror, Delaware Valley Art League

Rejoined Bones

"Rejoined Bones by Mary Kane consists of eight small squares aligned together within a rectangular frame of reference. They appear to be rendered with ares of charcoal and rust, sensitively placed on a cream colored background. Vibrating mysteriously with an unusual pulse beat, the entire image suggests an urge to achieve wholeness by a group of elements that have somehow been forcibly separated. The tension between the separate units and their desire to come together as one, makes for a powerful sense of artistic drive, quivering with extraordinary, internal power."

Burt Wasserman

Art Critic, Philadelphia Inquirer

Art Matters Artists Equity Show at American College

January 2003

"...a powerful sense of artistic drive, quivering with extraordinary, internal power."

"...organic shapes with clear and often dramatic washes of expressive high-key color that allow her to pull an emotion taut..."

"The casual imperfection of Mary Kane's abstract painting at Main Line Unitarian Church in Devon marks a spontaneous artist. Everything is rendered with an authoritative, light, painterly touch in her more colorful works. These combine organic shapes with clear and often dramatic washes of expressive high-key color that allow her to pull an emotion taut by compressing it into the precision of color. This is done by bleeding the color off the four edges of the canvas and projecting the viewer's eye into the center of the image, intensifying its force.

Certain deep-toned pictures involving emphatic use of charcoal are more stringently controlled, and often are essentially about drawing. Underneath the weight and sophistication of such pieces is Kane's growing appreciation of painterly chiaroscuro (light and shadow) involving these dark linear elements.

A third approach, quite promising is her foray here into collage. The work of the Paoli resident has grown in flexibility and subtlety."

Victoria Donohoe

Art Critic, The Inquirer

"Along with her newer, more energetic work reflecting her influence by Kline and Joan Mitchell, will be some earlier works including some collages.

Kane demonstrates her strong feeling about the family in paintings such as "Fly Away" giving one the sense of children leaving home in a rush of atmosphere and joy. 'MVP" reveals a torso stretching out of the frame into the beyond as her son, #30, reaches for success. "Chicago Birth" is a choreograph of flower colors done on the occasion of a grandson's birth.

Environmental issues have also dominated her paintings. In "Before the Development" one gets the feeling of wanting to hold onto the beauty before man destroys the countryside. Others show her tortured feeling for the destruction of trees or pollution of the air.

She has received many awards. She recently held a two person show at Art In Progress. Marion Locks has chosen her to participate in a two person show at the Wayne Art Center.

Her work is in several private collections.

Many of her paintings have a richness of texture with scratched through surfaces to reveal colors beneath. No process for her ever seems the same. She says, "to me, painting is visual poetry, choreographed like a dance... the lines and colors working in and out of space in a kinesthetic way. I try lots of things. I guess I like to surprise myself."

Gertrude A. Rosenberger, Curator

One Person Show

Press Release, April 1989
Westminster Seminary, Van Till Hall Gallery, Chestnut Hill, Pa