Mai Wyn Schantz
Denver, CO
For over 20 years Mai Wyn Schantz has exhibited her distinctive landscape and wildlife paintings on stainless steel.
Message
Landscape and wildlife painter Mai Wyn Schantz developed a love of nature at an early age canoeing the lake country of the Upper Midwest with her father. Her passion for the outdoors and interest in art, brought her to Colorado where she studied painting at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in Denver. Since graduating with her BFA in 1999, Schantz has exhibited steadily in commercial art galleries, art centers and beyond. In 2006 she was included in her first museum exhibition Up North: Imaging Northwoods Culture and Mythology at the Museum of Wisconsin Art and in 2008, was featured in a solo exhibition at the Arvada Center for the Arts & Humanities in Arvada, Colorado. Her distinctive paintings on aluminum and stainless steel span her entire career. Over the last 20 years she has refined her process for painting on metal and continues to find new inspiration. In 2018 she was honored with a solo exhibition at the Foothills Art Center in Golden, Colorado celebrating her twenty-years painting on metal followed by another large solo exhibition in 2023 at the O’Sullivan Gallery at Regis University. Beyond the studio, she remains an avid hiker spending her down time exploring trails and wildlife throughout the Colorado Rockies with her husband and young daughter Nova.
Statement
I’ve been painting on metal, first aluminum and now stainless steel, for over twenty years. Initially drawn to the material because of its slickness as a painting surface, I soon recognized it as a means to capture nature in a contemporary context. By exposing areas of the raw metal substrate, a unique juxtaposition results between the industrial material and my nature-based subject matter.
Despite our high tech, modern world we are still innately tied to the land. My paintings are about this relationship. They are an exploration of our evolving and often tenuous union with nature as well as our inherent desire to stay con- nected to it. My paintings seek out beauty and balance in the unification of these two seeming opposites.