Mary Heilmann

 

No painting is just a painting to Mary Heilmann. Each one has a story behind it and a reason for existing.

Paint is Heilmann's main medium of choice, but she also works with ceramics and makes furniture.

 

 

Heilmann gets the ideas for her works from past memories, her imagination, music, dreams, and colors. She also expresses that the "most important thing about art is communicating something like a conversation through the work". Heilmann tries to facilitate this kind of communication among her viewers by placing furniture she made around her works so that viewers can sit down and talk about them.

Her paintings are definitely abstract in nature. They are also very geometric due to her repeated use of squares in her pieces. The canvases Heilmann constructs also add to the geometric quality of her paintings as she combines two or more canvases together to make Tetras style shapes. Heilmann's very saturated paintings also have a sense of space to them as some squares recede in the background while other shapes are front and center in the picture plane.

A lot of time and effort seems to go into Heilmann's works and how they are presented. It is because of this dedication that her pieces really pop and are conversation worthy. 

 

 

Information provided by:

 

"Mary Heilmann." Art21. PBS, n.d. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.