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Robert Amos: Artist ‘just wants to have fun’

Mary Conley is a wonderful artist. A small sample of her work is part of a group show by students of Nancy Slaght.

robertamos.jpgMary Conley is a wonderful artist. A small sample of her work is part of a group show by students of Nancy Slaght. It’s titled Black and White and Grey All Over (at the Community Arts Council Gallery at the Cedar Hill Recreation Centre until March 2). I took this opportunity to interview her in her studio.

Conley comes from St. Andrew’s, N.B., “a town of 1,500 people,” she told me. “My family were lobster wholesalers.”

She has loved to make things since childhood, running up doll’s clothes on the sewing machine at the age of five. As there was no art school in New Brunswick, she spent a year at the Honolulu Academy of Art. Finding her fellow students brilliant and her future unsure, she returned to New Brunswick, where she studied to become a medical doctor. Conley came to Victoria in 1976 and practised medicine here until her retirement in 2003.

“I never painted the whole time,” she said. Even so, she joined Fairbank Calligraphy Society here and worked with Esme Davis, Sylvia Skelton and later privately for years with Fred Salmon, who had a career in the U.S. as a professional lettering artist. Some of her calligraphic pieces are in the current show.

“I was making broadsides with calligraphy — it wasn’t just straight lettering,” she said. Her lettering was part of a painted page, and then came books and her specialty, pop-up books. She’s part of a book-illustrators group called Book Cell and admitted she’s “got a cupboard full of handmade books.” Her air-brushed pop-up Alice in Wonderland was a big winner in the Sooke show a few years back.

And she drew: “Even when I was working, I was going to XChanges and drawing.” A deep knowledge of anatomy, from her medical studies, gives her an advantage.
With her retirement, Conley studied watercolour, retaining the talented Catherine Moffatt for private lessons. In subsequent years, she studied with Caren Heine and Marnie Ward, “but I could never get the darks dark enough,” she said. “And so I went to oil. Not acrylic. It’s very transparent, and reminded me of watercolour somehow. I like oil.”

From the start, her work was highly finished and emotionally direct, especially her portraits of children. This led her to try pastels. She has been painting with Slaght’s pastel group for the past three or four years.

“I seem to belong to a lot of groups,” she chuckled.

The pastels resulted in a series of birds, all now sold. Conley’s birds are as highly painted as those of Lansdowne or Bateman, but they have more attitude: a bit of anthropomorphism. Is that intentional?

“Yes,” she confessed. Her latest birds exemplify the Seven Deadly Sins. She showed me Wrath, a rooster, and Greed, a vulture. These birds are dramatically posed and relentlessly detailed.

“Who has ever seen a rooster’s eyelid?” the artist wondered. Her birds utterly fix you in their gaze.

Though a consistent prize-winner at Sooke, the annual Sidney show and the Community Arts Council’s Look show, she has no gallery representation.

“People come to me to buy the paintings,” she said. “Just about half a dozen people, but they come and get them as soon as they’re done.” That suits her just fine.
“I’ve had the pressure job,” she smiled. “I don’t want any pressure. I just want to do what I want to do.”

To demonstrate the point, she brought out a book on art deco buildings of Victoria, entirely drawn on her computer. She’ll get it printed at Island Blue, using its print-on-demand service.

“I think it’s terrific. Why not self-publish?” she asked.

Conley and her husband, David Gray, live in a lovely old house in Rockland. In the front hall I was greeted by Tweedledee and Tweedledum, each more than a metre tall.

They are illustrations from Alice in Wonderland by John Tenniel come to life, and were made by Gray and Conley of Celluclay.

“It’s just like wood,” Conley noted. They like to work together on sculptures. Gray, an artist and former fisherman, spends most of his time building mechanized sculptures for Galey Farms — he built the three life-sized dinosaurs, with swinging tails and mouths that open and shut.

Conley is the treasurer and membership secretary of the Federation of Canadian Artists and is preparing for the group’s 75th anniversary exhibition from June 22 to July 6 at the CACGV Gallery at the Cedar Hill Rec Centre. She is also in charge of the art section of the Saanich Agricultural Fair.

“I’ve tried to beef up the participation there,” she said — with no hint of a pun. Please consider submitting an entry this year.

Surrounded by the many things she loves to make, she reflected on the broad community engagement it has resulted in.

“You know, that’s the exciting thing about living in Victoria,” Conley said. “There are so many opportunities for artists to show their work.” Here is an artist who is able to realize her goals right here: “I just want to have fun.”

Note: After writing last week’s column on Art Thompson at Alcheringa, I visited a show at the Legacy Gallery (630 Yates St., until May 28) with a bewildering title. It’s called Emerging Through Fog: Tsa-Qwa-Supp and Tlehpik — Together by Tlehpik (Hjalmer Wenstob). It was a surprise to find that this is mostly an exhibition of prints and drawings by … Art Thompson. Tlehpik (or Wenstob) is a fine arts student at the University of Victoria who was inspired by Thompson in his childhood. This exhibit is his tribute.