Mary Vaste Gillis creates paintings that push and pull from within, giving all a vibrancy. Whatever the internalized/realized, visionary outcome for the viewer, the takeaway is BREATH, life itself. V.Houghtaling

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mary Vaste Gillis is a California based artist whose expressionistic and gestural oil, gouache and ink paintings reveal figures and fields within a fluid psychic space in which symbols and colors carry an infused imaginal presence. She explores consciousness, emotional fullness, movement, and trauma, striving to bring these deeply personal and sometimes hidden currents to Silence and an accepting Stillness.

Mary describes her early romance with color and substance: “My young feet were stained by the red clay of North Georgia.  As children, we covered our entire bodies with this glorious ochre, let it bake dry, then swam it off to reveal silky, seemingly new skin.  Such was our relationship to the land itself. The colored lights of stained glass amidst the dark wood interior of our small church captivated my spirit and sent me into private, rich rapture, setting the stage for the colors and lights of inner states.”  As a teen, she learned to make her own oil paints in the Maroger Classical Method, loving the sensuality of grinding the black oil base with earth and mineral powdered pigments.

​She completed her BA in both painting and art history at Florida State University and in Florence, Italy, where she was particularly moved by the works of Fra Angelico and how he communicated PRESENCE through his figures as well as the re-emergence of THE FEMININE in the art of that same period. Mary began exhibiting in 1980. In 1986, she completed her master's degree from JFKU in Orinda, California, in transpersonal counseling psychology.  Making art and studying consciousness are deeply intertwined for her, one informing the other. Today she is spellbound by GAZING itself, by what opens up internally and externally through empty, open viewing.

Mary’s work is in the public collections of The Arts Council of Gainesville, Georgia, and The Sangre de Cristo Arts Center of Pueblo, Colorado, as well as in private collections in the United States, Canada and Sweden. Mary completed an artist residency with the Ossabaw Island Foundation off the coast of Georgia. She regularly exhibits at the Occidental Center for the Arts, Occidental, California.