Mary Kent Bailey's current show at the Copper Mine Picture Cafe is composed of 15 landscapes depicting various Arizona topographies. Her style and method of image production is traditional in approach, thus falling into a catagory whose legacy is rich with the prior efforts of previous painters. The motivation for continuing to paint a subject matter that has been done over and over again is understandable if one has ever visited the scenic beauty of such places as the Grand Canyon, White Mountains, or Sedona, to mention just a few. In truth there are hundreds of such natural wonders scattered through out the SW region and Arizona in particular. It seems only human to want to package this magic and take it home.
In "Deep Canyon Country," the packaged magic begins with a foreground hill that goes from the bottom third of the canvas on the left to the upper third of the canvas on the right. The hill is shadowed in cool turquoise stones that are lined with almost horizontal rows of various sizes of dark green pine and shrub. At the top of foreground hill, on the right, a sliver of yellow light touches the surface edge of the stone, as well as the trees that rest in this general location. In the middle ground, on the left side of the canvas, another hill, which is exposed to the sunlight, slopes upward to the left; its juxtaposition to the foreground is such as to form a "V" whose sides touch both edges of the canvas in an almost symmetrical arrangement. Its golden yellow surface is contoured with several lines of green. In the background a horizontal canyon wall crosses the canvas width at about the same height as the foreground hill. Beyond the distant cliff, clouds tinted with hues of violet and blue lay like a thick frosting on the surface of the land; above the delicious looking clouds the blue sky opens up to the distant horizons.
The foreground hill, with softley shaped rocks, has an inviting cushion like quality, whose beckoning nature is enhanced by the decorative pattern placement of the shrubs and trees. Crowning the layers of cake like rock strata is the golden sundrenched hilltop where candy green trees invite one to visually taste the desert sweetness. In the middle ground and balancing the foreground hill, which slopes to the right, is the small golden hill, of similar construction, rising to the left. Because it mimics the larger foreground hill, by association, it draws from the latter's appeal. The horizontal line of the distant cliff creates a restful, almost peaceful quality, as it stretches between the more dynamic hillsides on the right and left. This compositional arrangement allows the restful background to adhere to the pleasurable foreground, thus creating an easy, pleasurable experience.
Mary Kent Bailey seduces the viewer through subtle color and shape arrangements to create a package of landscape "magic" that is well worth taking home.