Webpage: maryciani.com Email: maryciani5@gmail.com Cell: 979-575-1825

Looking Back

Now a painter of Deluge and Heat, of Global Warming and Climate Crisis, an Art of Warning and of Witness, I look back and see a life in art, a path to this time, to this work.

I moved from teacher to teacher, and medium to medium. I learned line from Leonard Baskin at Smith College, abstraction from Stephen Greene at The Art Students League, intuitive large drawing and videography from Herbert Olds at Carnegie-Mellon University, color from Mignonette Cheng at the University of Michigan, and courage from John Alexander, James Surls, and Suzanne Bloom at the University of Houston.

Earlier, I was always quietly encouraged by art teachers: Miss Ash and Miss Adams in elementary school; lessons at age ten in charcoal when I walked alone along the beach to my teacher’s house every Saturday morning with a dollar in my pocket; oil painting when I was thirteen at the art store in downtown Quincy, Mass (I was told not to paint figures, so I painted figures.); and art every day in high school independently doing my own thing.

All were prelude to learning art seriously during the Sixties: studio art and art history at Smith, and three years in New York City of evening classes, three hours, five nights a week, mainly with Stephen Greene at the Art Student League. I learned from MoMA, art openings, art friends, and art talk, while I worked during the day as a book designer on lower Park Avenue. When I moved to Berkeley, there was an adventurous painting course at the San Francisco Art Institute, and fluid projections at rock concerts. In Pittsburgh I received an MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University while I also helped write and illustrate an underground newspaper, The Pittsburgh Fair Witness, which I named at a raucous staff meeting.

In the Seventies I moved to Texas, married and had two daughters, and sometimes lived in or near Paris. A turning point was an advanced oil-painting class at the University of Michigan. I received an MFA in painting at the University of Houston at a high point of artistic ferment in that city, commuting from College Station 100 miles in on Mondays and out on Wednesdays, exhibiting with fellow students. In the Eighties I joined both artist-run Summer White Studios in Houston, and the faculty of the Visualization Department of Texas A&M University. I participated with Dick Davison, Bob Schiffhauer, Alan Stacell, John Walker, Rodney Hill, and Karen Hillier during a golden age of art in the Architecture and Visualization Departments. In the Nineties and in the New Century, I was an early adopter of Photoshop and pursued digital painting in PS: Ladders, Boxes, and Map Mountain Moon, and exhibiting widely. I made album covers and CD booklets for my sister Suzanne Ciani, and with AFEW created installations. In the 2010s and early 2020s I returned to drawing and painting IRL, now in professional markers and Golden paints, to create an Art of Warning and then, as the climate crisis grew worse throughout those years, an Art of Witness. This work continues.

Much of this world I knew in the past is gone, and the dangerous world recently foreseen is with us now.

Yet, looking back, I see that the knowledge and courage I learned then are what I use now to create ongoing urgent work.