Artist Mary McDonald invites us into her home studio to discuss her career and influences.
Summary
Mary McDonald shares her artistic journey and experiences that shaped her career as a painter. She recalls being encouraged to engage in creative activities from an early age, with exposure to Scottish art and galleries.
In 1995, she was particularly influenced by the Young British Artists movement, especially an installation by the Wilson sisters at the City Art Centre. This experience showed her how art could create immersive experiences that affect the viewer physically and emotionally.
Mary studied interior design at Duncan of Jordanstone Art School, though painting remained her true passion. A significant turning point came when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After successful treatment, this experience prompted her to be more open about sharing her art with others.
She describes her artistic process as being deeply influenced by Scottish weather and landscapes. Rather than creating exact replications, she focuses on capturing the emotional essence of a scene, particularly influenced by her design background.
Mary discusses her artistic influences, including the Scottish colourists and Joan Eardley, whose emotional approach to painting particularly resonates with her. She maintains sketchbooks that combine detailed drawings with more abstract interpretations of landscapes.
Her approach to abstraction is intuitive, focusing on light, reflections, and the mystery of natural scenes. Weather plays a crucial role in her work, influencing both her subject choice and painting style.
Transcript
It's an interesting one, Rob. I think I was fortunate to always be encouraged to paint and draw and make things from a very early stage, the beginning. So it was just within family life.
I always enjoyed visiting the galleries and I suppose, like most other people in Scotland, you're very familiar with the Scottish colourists and the Joan Eardley side of Scottish life and those eastern views and everything. And obviously that's wonderful.
But I specifically remember and I think it was about 1995-ish, it was the time of the Young British Artists and I was just a young person. I hadn't even gone to art school then, and I remember Edinburgh was flooded with these really interesting and for me completely new pieces of art, and obviously there was the Damien Hirst and all, it was all sort of eye-catching.
But one in particular I remember really stood out to me and it was in the City Art Centre, and I went back time and time again. The people running the art centre must have thought, who's she? I just couldn't get enough of it and it was installation work by their twins, the Wilson sisters.
What it really brought home to my creative imagination was that they combined physical spaces with photography and sound and you really immerse yourself into an experience. And I just all of a sudden started to realise that's what art is all about. It's just it you feel it running through your body.
And I think from that point on I always loved painting, painting just has been my thing. But as I mentioned, I also just love making things. I love everything to do with creativity. Yeah, that made a huge impression on me.
And I think from that point on that was really me at the end of my schooling making decisions of what I was going to do next, and I think the Young British Artists really inspired me as to I don't want to be an installation artist. I'm not really clued up about photography and film, but it really flooded my imagination, definitely.
And so then I went on to art school, to Duncan of Jordanstone and I kind of always had a really practical focus of what are you gonna, how are you gonna make a living? So I studied interior design there, and I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
But I think I also have to say I really just loved the art school experience. I loved nipping into all the other departments and getting a taster of what everybody does, and it was just everywhere that you turned everyone's minds were working and they were just creating and it was just wonderful.
And I ended up painting my entire degree show actually, and every now and again I think about that because I remember on the degree show night, overhearing a few people saying, you know, it's lovely and I loved it. It said she should go and on do drawing and painting and I was like, still so young, but I was like, I really kind of would like to do that, but my mind is telling me I really should go and work and I had done well and, so I worked in design for quite a number of years, but I always kept on drawing, life drawing and painting and just kept it all going.
And then I actually became very ill a few years ago and I discovered I had pancreatic cancer, and for me that was, it was actually, I'm very fortunate that I've had the surgery and the treatment and in a really weird way, I know this sounds funny, I feel lucky in some ways I've had it because it has, it's really changed my outlook on life.
And it's those weeks of even after the surgery and I'm waiting for results in hospital. I can even take myself back to those stages and thinking you're slightly tunnelled back from real life and it makes you reassess. I don't know how much longer I've got because I haven't got my results yet. Either way, why have I always held myself back with putting what I do out there? Because actually, I'm just being shy about it.
And actually what's the worst that can happen? I'm still gonna do it, but maybe I could just show more people what I do. Yeah, so for me it was a bit of a wake-up call and that's what really pushed me out as far as oh, I'd like to show people what I do now and rather than in the past, people have often seen what I've done and I've sold some pieces that way. But so that really changed everything for me.
And also, I feel through the painting and, what the weather. It's always a good painting day. And I think living in Scotland, I'm lucky that we get such changeable weather because for me, it's super interesting to paint. Yeah.
I think it's really hard to put my finger on it. More than anything it's just a feeling. It's feeling that I want to paint and, so, I'm so lucky to be surrounded by the views around here, lovely walks or up to the loch or or travelling further. There's just so much inspiration. And so sometimes that's enough to make me want to paint, and sometimes I'll take a canvas with me and start just rough marks on it.
And that's lovely because it almost injects energy into a big blank canvas which otherwise sometimes is difficult to start. But if you're in front of a view that just pulls forward, and but I most of the time I don't religiously want to replicate a view. That's not what I'm interested in. I actually just love the feeling that it gives me.
So, with all my paintings, I'm really, you know that feeling. So you're on the loch side and it can be blowing a gale and dreadful weather and actually if you've walked there most people are saying to you, oh isn't it, it's cold and it's terrible weather and it is, but there's something about being in awe of where you are and a big sky rolling above you.
And I do think, yeah, maybe it's a cliché but Scottish light is beautiful and the colours can be saturated and just soak through you, and that moment you're standing there or sitting there and you could well be soaked to the skin and frozen, but it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter.
You kind of suddenly realise how big the world is and how much this view has seen before you were around, and you're only there for such a short period of time and then we all move on and it will be there again. And I love that feeling. I really, I kind of feel that is what life's all about for me and, I get a real thrill from that.
And so when I'm painting, I tend just to keep, I don't really think enough about, it's just maybe embarrassing to say, I just feel the urge to paint and, and sometimes, sometimes I surprise myself it looks very little like what is in front of me, but that doesn't in the slightest bother me because it's all about the way it makes me feel.
And it could be, yeah, to just purely to do with the direction of the weather and the light and colour. And I think my background in design also plays a huge part in what I do and the way I do it. And whether that's from what the sky's directing onto the shoreline or from a viewer's position onto the view.
I love that we can interpret it our own way and I love that I can extend a sightline, and encourage a viewer to look at a certain point or to travel around a painting. So, I may be wrong, but I think maybe my design background punctuates what I do as well, but I'm not doing it consciously. Again, it just sort of happens when I'm painting and I get excited about painting.
I just love moving paint around. And I love mixing colour and, yeah, and I feel, I just cannot say enough how lucky I feel to do what I do because it really is my balance in life. We've all got day-to-day struggles, but I feel it's my escape as well as my work.
And so, I feel, as I say, I've always painted. I've always been creative. I've always made things in all different forms, crafting and art and building and I just love using my hands, and, but I did get this jolt to really say, Mary, stop being so self-conscious about what I paint because actually painting is what I love more than anything else.
And so when I was unwell, I made that decision to stop hiding it and if I was going to live and continue to be able to work that that's what I was going to do from now on because, I'd made myself a promise.
So it was an important time for me to make that promise because I wouldn't let myself down on it. And I think if I hadn't had such a serious illness, I probably still wouldn't have done it to be honest because I'm not a confident person.
But now I'm really keen to champion and push other artists to create and if they feel it in themselves that they should do it, and there's so many times that I meet people and I'm encouraging them to just do it. What's the worst that can happen?
Get yourself an Instagram account and just other artists will encourage you and you'll feel good about it and I was on the train fairly recently coming back from a friend's birthday and, I met these ladies on the train who were coming back from a lovely lunch and they were quite jolly and they were chatting and they probably saw my phone cover which is covered in paint and so they asked me what, oh what do you do? I see all the paint. So I explained what I do.
And one of the ladies started nudging her friend and saying, that's what you want to do and you're so good and, and she just didn't have the confidence to, to show, you know, I could see it and there's just I'm the same. We're quite shy, but I couldn't help but again encourage her to just, if that's what you really want to do, just do it because life is so unpredictable and if you really feel this passion for painting or drawing or making, but it's not a traditional way to make an income, so you talk yourself out of it. But you only live once, so just do it.
I think my list could be endless. I think my first awareness of admiring artists was most definitely the Scottish colourists because it's so much part of growing up here and seeing those exhibitions and, and they're just beautiful. They really are.
I also feel a huge influence was Joan Eardley and her freedom with expressing the weather and the waves and the coastline and actually her Glasgow tenements and the children, everything about them is just actually everything I adore. Because it's all to do with the emotion behind it. It's not representative in any way. She's led by the line and those the structure of the buildings and the children and the graffiti, but it's all just what's in the heart really and I love that so much.
And, colourwise, yes, I'm attracted to Fauvism and I love reading on all these different eras of art and, if I can fall in waves of inspiration. I really can. And, but also I feel perhaps I just get very easily excited about any creativity because even Richard Scarry drawings, we looked at them as children and now I show them to my children and they're just brilliant.
And so I find when I take a lot of photos and I also have sketchbooks and what I find interesting about my sketchbooks is they're a complete mix of sometimes it's a little pencil drawing and it's quite detailed and it maybe harks back to my design training and I'll find myself getting into the detail of the structure of, a shoreline and the rocks or if it's a city it's all the buildings and everything there.
But other times, I look at it and I think, wow, how did I do that? Because I've just applied paint and my pastels and I've kind of created a memory that doesn't look at all like where I was, but in some ways it's all that I need to then prompt those feelings once I'm back in the studio and I want to paint again.
So, yeah, I find I do, I get very interested and excited looking at all sorts of art, all kind of built pieces and anything that makes you feel it. You just feel what somebody has created. I love that connection that you then think, oh I understand that artist or I understand what they were wanting to do, and that interpretation of what they were wanting to do. Yeah.
I feel it's just rolled out of me if I'm completely honest. I've not consciously taught myself to abstract, abstract a view. I'm more aware of pockets of light and reflections and the depth of undercurrents in the loch.
Talk and almost the mystery of certain areas. I love perhaps imagining a little story going on under the water or up in the sky and so I'm not structuring my paintings, I'm not planning them, and I'm never looking to formally represent what I'm looking at.
I generally think about the weather. I think the weather is a huge part of what I do actually, because I notice myself when it's extremely beautiful blue skies, sometimes I think this is a day for a still life rather than a landscape because if it's a cloudless sky sometimes it doesn't give me the same inspiration to paint a landscape.
But yeah, I think the abstraction of you is definitely purely my interpretation of simplifying the force of the wind and the sun and the feelings of it all and likewise if I am painting a still life, again I just try to absorb the beauty of it's usually flowers.
I'm very lucky to have a local flower farmer live near me and they produce the most beautiful tulips and oh just amazing. And so if I'm ever looking for inspiration for that, that's where I go and buy some of her pieces and again I don't think I could ever do justice to the beauty of her flowers.
So instead I love to consider the relationship between the flowers and where they create little pockets of shadow and how that then plays with the vessel that it's in. Yeah, it just happens.
