Artist Bio

Mary K. Connelly is Associate Professor Emerita, retired after 16 years at the University of Colorado Denver. She was Program Head of Painting/Drawing and Illustration for nine years in the Department of Visual Arts. Connelly received her BFA in painting from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA in painting from Indiana University in Bloomington. She was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France for a two-month fellowship in 2010. Connelly has been featured in fifteen one-person shows since 2003, many of which ran in major art centers such as New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. Her work has also appeared in many prestigious invitational exhibitions at the Salmagundi Club in New York City; the SFMOMA Artists Gallery in San Francisco; and at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, California, among others. Her paintings are in both private and public collections and her work has won numerous awards and honors.

Artist Statement

Over the past ten years my painting has primarily been alla prima, oil on wood panel, depicting light filled spaces, highly influenced by the interiors of Hopper, Bonnard and Vermeer. These small, intimate paintings are spaces for longing and meditation, where color and light convey a world psychologically and spiritually charged. Whether drenched in light, or a darkened alcove, silent narratives run through these interiors suggesting a story just unfolded, or yet to unfold.

My series Perception and Memory is an ongoing body of work, which include both small and large-scale narrative paintings. Based on family photographs from the 1930s through 1950s, this collection examines the relationship between longing, memory, and loss.  Combined are both “real” and constructed images and memories, mediated by the fiction of the family snapshot. I am especially drawn to images of my parents that recall the optimism of the post-World War II generation and the promise of the American Dream. Yet, beneath the surface appearance of happiness and security lie darker truths of depression, anxiety and loss. This series, which began as a memorial project for my parents, continues to engage and compel me almost two decades since their death.