What is art but a conversation, soul to soul, searcher to searcher.

Artworks are only tools, instruments used to initiate the conversation. Therefore, what I have to say can only be made meaningful through what the viewer brings to this conversation.

The viewer is not expected to admire my tools or to exalt my craftsmanship. Rather the viewer is invited as “Honored Guest” to join in the adventure of my personal fumbling, stumbling journey towards meaning, toward fulfillment, towards Being.

Through this art/conversation, I hope to unite my own experience with the viewer’s life journey and to arrive together perhaps at a place of understanding and affirmation, or perhaps at a place of conflict and challenge – always at a crossroad. I hope that artist and viewer can come together, however briefly, as fellow travelers, as brothers in a world of too many strangers. It is this communication that is “Fine Art” and it is the viewer who allows me to truly be an artist. And it is thus that the making of art becomes an act of community.

Mary Cate-Carroll, M.F.A

I grew up as an Army brat and thus world traveler. My parents took, and I must admit sometimes dragged me to see the great art and architecture of whatever country in which they were stationed.  Thus I got to experience Kabuki theater, Japanese dance, art and architecture while living in Kyoto, Japan.  What I remember most about Japan was the intense color of not just the art but the landscape. In the streams rippled bright red and blue lengths of silk, being rinsed.

Europe brought three years of every Hapsburg castle, every Rococo as well as medieval church—Chartres, Notre Dame, Worms. I got to stand in front of the great Impressionists and Post Impressionists—ahh! my much loved Van Gogh.  In the Louvre I remember feeling dwarfed before David's Napoleon on a rearing horse.  As a girl scout I got to explore the Druid stones of Stonehenge and climb the ancient sacred oaks. In the Sixties—hippie dippie—I returned to Europe to live in London for a year; to also gather in Spain, to visit Picasso's stomping grounds and to return again to France. I made a pilgrimage to Amsterdam to see more beloved Van Gogh's, and found the bulk of the work on tour in America. 

My dad was a voracious reader. I developed the habit of reading whatever he was. I remember him approving of some — Aristotle, Ivanhoe — for example, and disapproving of others — "You're too young," he said, taking away from me "Tortilla Flat." I don't know that I understood much of what I read at that young age, but I was exposed, and the trait developed to research and explore ideas while forming and reforming opinion. 

Roman Catholic schools exposed me to great art and great truths and great error. The nuns while preaching charity, behaved with a sometimes gleeful, sometimes morose sadomasochism that made learning a torture... and a triumph. But the process steeled me in an icy (though unfocused) rebellion against the hypocrisy of it.  I gained my first experiences of standing against tyranny, for listening to what my gut was saying (this can't be goodness) for standing for what I believed, and of course learned the often painful consequences of such stands. ‘Incorrigible’ was, I think, the word — I wore it like a badge of courage. There was one exception I remember, one English teacher who encouraged me to express myself in writing, but I had already a better love and place of solace — ART. 

My formal art education began at the Corcoran Museum Art School, where I was blessed to study with two great teachers, Harold Isen for Drawing and William Woodward for Painting. Later in Grad School I was again blessed with a great teacher in Grace Hartigan, at the Hoffberger School of the Maryland Institute College of Art.  From there I won the Walters Traveling Fellowship which brought me back to Europe, this time to Italy — to Florence, to Rome, the Colisseum, the catacombs, to Germany, to Auschwitz... now grown, now better able to understand and to research, and thus to incorporate the truth I found into the discipline of Visual Art. 

LINK TO A RESUME FOR MARY CATE-CARROLL, M.F.A (Printable PDF file)