About Mary F. Coats

The dreamlike quality of Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities, has been haunting my most recent work. Repetition has become an undeniable focus, as I continuously pull from a catalogue of forms I have assembled. Each work can be considered as a portrayal of a unique, but simultaneously familiar, space. These are places I have been or imagined or dreamed of, spaces I have inhabited or imagined or dreamed of. Like the cities described in Calvino’s novel, it becomes difficult to tell if these are spaces one can truly enter or inhabit. Perhaps they are imagined, perhaps they are real but one is unable or unwilling to enter. Calvino writes that “Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.”[1] 

Although each painting can be considered individually, I am interested in the constant repetition, echoing and color play that is occurring in the work.  I feel that through these repeated forms a larger, more complex environment is coming to exist, only reachable through recollection.  In an attempt to recreate the true essence of a time or place, I am continuously questioning the way I remember things, in hopes to more clearly discern what is true.