MARY GELEZUNAS

Mary Gelezunas holds an MFA in Theater Costume Design from SUNY/Purchase, where she first used gouache and colored pencils to render costume designs.

Well before that, creating visual art has been an integral part of her life since earliest memory when she drew vibrantly colored flowers on fabric, made mallard duck paper dolls, and became so enamored of the flying horses in Fantasia that she sculpted one with its baby. Since then, she has enjoyed acrylic painting, drawing with pen and ink, jewelry making, collaging, taking photographs, creating textile art, and collecting unusual objects.

Following in the footsteps of her father, an accomplished artist, she took up oil painting when she inherited his hidden wooden box of 1950s oil paints, revealed when cleaning out her parents’ basement.

Always intrigued by abandoned buildings, especially industrial sites, Mary sees us all as part of a very long continuum of history; the ghosts of what came before will linger with our own after our time. She remains fascinated by insects, birds, and industrial equipment; to her, the quintessential postmodern still life consists of three seemingly-randomly-but-artfully-placed traffic cones.

She takes as her credo Marcel Proust’s famous words: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes.” That, however, is misquoted; his more accurately-translated words are: “The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is…”