About the artist
Mary Adam was born in Ireland and studied medicine. She has been living in Trinidad since 1973 and started painting and drawing in 1975. In the late 1970s her work was shown at several Trinidad Art Society annual exhibitions.
She had a joint show at Horizons Art Gallery in 2002, followed by a solo show entitled A Matter of Form at Horizons in 2004. Her most recent solo show was at 101 Art Gallery in September 2006. She took part in an exhibition at the Spence Gallery in Toronto in 2005 with two other Caribbean artists and has shown in numerous juried group exhibitions over the years (exhibition list).
She has received awards for painting from the Trinidad Art Society at their Annual Exhibitions in November 2000 and November 2003.
Her work is in private collections in Trinidad and Tobago, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland.
She is a member of the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago (and its sub-group the Plein Air Picassos), as well as the Women in Art Organization of Trinidad and Tobago. She is listed on the website of the Irish Arts Review.
Art education
Mary is currently working towards a BA degree in Creative Arts from Bucks New University (BNU) in the UK via the Open College of the Arts. She has completed the Diploma level and aims to complete the work for the BA in 2009.
Over the years she has attended a number of figure drawing workshops run by the Women in Art organization of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as numerous workshops at CCA7. She participated in a programme at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, Ireland, in July 2002. She completed an online course in Art History for credit at Oxford University in 2005.
Process
Drawing is the mainspring of Mary's work, and this usually means drawing from life or memory, almost never from photographs. She uses many different media for drawing -- Conté crayon, charcoal, lithograph crayon, pen and ink, pencil, pastels, or whatever comes to hand. She approaches painting through preliminary sketches and studies.
She paints mainly in oils and acrylics, and less often in watercolor and gouache. Recently she has been exploring collage and printmaking.
