I am fascinated by the stories we tell about our lives, the lives of others and about the world. Whether myth or memory, imagined or experienced, personal or societal, our stories connect us to our core concerns, our deepest aspirations and the fears we all share. I love the challenge of taking the essential elements of a narrative and creating work which both transmits and transmutes and brings something fresh and relatable to the viewer. Though the back-story of each painting is important to me, I want the viewer to be free to approach the work from their own individual perspective, from their own history and sensibility. I love it when someone finds something in my work that is new to me. I use narrative as a structuring device, suggesting imagery, an emotional tone and a formal approach for each individual painting. Striving for a dynamic tension between form and content, I try to tap my most deeply available self to create work that strikes a chord of recognition in the viewer, as I believe that the idiosyncrasy of the personal, deeply and truthfully excavated can express the universal. I appreciate seeing indications of the artist’s physicality, their unique fingerprint, as evidenced in brush-stroke and mark-making. Paint is kin to skin, viscera, blood, mineral, plant and stardust.
Painter Mary DeVincentis employs a deeply personal iconography to investigate the dilemmas and mysteries of existence. Her October 2021 solo exhibition "Alone in This Together" included the work of fourteen guest artists, all of whom explore related concerns in their practices. Previous solo exhibitions include "Out There" at M. David and Co. in 2019, and "Dwellers on the Threshold" at David and Schweitzer Contemporary in 2018. On-going series include "Dark Matters", paintings which investigate the shadowy side of human experience, and "Sin Eaters", works which depict society’s saints, martyrs, scapegoats and outcasts. DeVincentis earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Maryland Institute College of Art and was awarded a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Printmaking from St. Martin’s College of Art in London, UK.