Galleries: Shirley Mackey Pieces

Shirley Mackey is a landscape artist who paints inside. That sounds like an improbability, or at least a dichotomy. Why paint landscapes inside?

It may seem especially strange for a Florida artist to paint inside until you realize that her goal is not to capture in paint what is outside your window, but rather your personal memory of it. Shirley Mackey wants to conjure up memories and all the sensations that go along with memory — the scents, the wind, the rain, the exhaust, and the noises. She creates artwork that is meant to move the viewer emotionally or psychically. She attempts to make busy 21st century people stop and pause in front thick, impastoed canvases. She lures one in with idyllic scenes and somber slick city streets to make viewers vulnerable to interpretation.

She has taken inspiration from past masters. On first glance it is easy to assume that Claude Monet may have been her primary influence. She certainly has recreated the bucolic pastures, swaying trees and even the bleating sheep. But look again. There is an aura of mist and softness of texture that makes the picture ephemeral, just like a memory on the edge of consciousness.

One might consider John Sloan as her muse. She has certainly acknowledged that his painting, Wake of the Ferry, 1907, was one of the first paintings to ‘speak to her.’ Its dark moodiness is haunting. Sloan, like his fellow artists of the Ashcan School of art, was realist. As opposed to Monet and the French Impressionists, their goal was recording the harshness of real life, not the dynamics of light and color. They kept black on their palettes and used it to create scenes that were evocative and beautiful. Even though the scenes record a century ago, we linger visually and long. Mackey's city streets make viewers feel as though they have become participants in film noire.

I wonder if Edward Hopper may have been an influence. There are pregnant pauses in his paintings that are perplexing and voyeuristic. His paintings require extensive viewing, connecting to personal memories. These works may have been inspirations, but Mackey's works are her own. She takes the best the master has to offer and employs her own imagination to complete the scene. Her stop-action snippets foster a sensation of time and space travel.

Whether the scene is rolling hills, a majestic sunset or a bustling cityscape, her work has the ability to inhabit our imagination. She brings us back to the power of the painted scene with all its nuances, lushness of paint, and physicality. She may use photographs and examples from art history as starting points, but each piece becomes unique. She has tapped into the magic of fine art — people looking at art become better informed, emotionally enriched and subliminally better able to experience new input.

Shirley Mackey is a conjurer of memories. She gives us a springboard to the world of imagination through her paintings. It is a vicarious vacation that we all should afford.

Jan Clanton
Orlando Museum of Art