Naples
Maryann Lucas lives and works in Sag Harbor, New York. She is primarily self-taught but has received instruction and support from wonderful and generous members of Long Island’s East End artistic community. She regularly attends painting workshops with contemporary artists she admires, and several painters graduated from The Florence Academy of Art. Working exclusively in oils, Lucas sets out almost daily to create plein aire landscapes and seascapes. In her studio, she works directly from life and captures the beauty of natural light as it transforms ordinary objects into visual delights.
Lucas describes her work as expressive realism. She wants it to celebrate all that is well with this world, despite its pockets of darkness. “For me,” she says, “I know I am in the presence of something beautiful, when it steals my breath, silences my mind, pushes out everything else and draws me in. I trust that feeling. I use it to guide my hands as I arrange a still life or scan a landscape to determine where to set down my easel. Ultimately, that sensation is what drives me to paint and to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. I try to celebrate what is simple yet sacred on the surface of life with the goal of soothing what aches the human heart."
Becoming ever more skilled as an oil painter is another of Lucas’ goals. To that end she remains teachable, finding that studying and painting with other artists is vital to her own evolution. She has studied with favorite artists including Michael Klein, Dennis Perrin, Ben Fenske, Melissa Franklin, and Ramiro Sanchez, and the late Jack Riggio, a prominent local artist from Southampton, NY. Lucas has taken classes at the Victor D'Amico Art Institute in Amagansett, NY and The Art Students League in New York, NY.