Mary is an artist and gallery owner from Charleston, South Carolina. She has made a career out of capturing the average, working class American in their daily life. For interested students, Mary encourages artists to learn as much about the business side as possible as well as seek entry careers that pay the bills and gives them time to work on their craft.
Transcript
>> My name is Mary Whyte, and I'm a professional artist. Well I'm a people painter I've pretty much spent my entire career painting the people that I know; my neighbors. I did a large series of paintings of blue collar workers around the south, and that's largely what interest me are people who live their life under the radar in everyday jobs. So for me a project would entail the idea, of course, first and then getting to that subject. Say it's a shrimper or a elevator operator that I want to meet and be able to sketch. So I'll take photographs on location, drawings if I can, and then come back to my studio near Charleston, South Carolina and then do the finished painting in the studio, which can take anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks to do. From there it goes to our gallery in Charleston, Coleman Fine Art, and is sold hopefully to a collector or a museum, and then it's crated up and shipped off. I look for a universal profound quality and that's really difficult to explain other than that. But it's I know that when people see my paintings they won't necessarily probably ever meet the person. They won't necessarily recognize the person. But my hope is that they will recognize the emotion that I'm painting in that person.
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