Marjorie Schwartz is an abstract painter who brings the looseness of watercolor to acrylics and oils. Inspired by the natural world, her paintings employ melting forms, ruptured outlines and vibrant colors in an effort to capture both the thing and its core aliveness. She has studied with Melanie Delgado and Meredith Rosier at the Woodstock School of Art and Cissy Smith Marks at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Schwartz views life as an open, richly creative process and assists others toward this end as a clinical psychologist in private practice. She lives and works in the Catskills and New York City.
Statement
In March of 2020 our vacation home in the Catskills became our full-time home. After 25 years of city living, suddenly I was conducting therapy sessions from my screened-in porch with the scent of lilac wafting in. The shifting color palette and ever-changing symphony of birdsong felt like a marvel. Fast forward to the following winter - I bought a few watercolors and began doodling flowers during phone sessions with patients. Four years and countless flowers later, these forms have morphed into shapes I no longer recognize. What’s surfaced is some impulse to capture the essence of each thing. This crystalized for me when a teacher said, “Don’t paint a tree, paint the feeling of a tree." Making art has become a way to celebrate whatever ineffable thing unites all living things and pushes them to grow and change. I feel myself as part of that system, moving into iterations I don’t yet know, all the while seeking to unearth some essential part. It’s my attempt to capture whatever feels like too much to bear - relentless beauty, the swiftness of seasons, and all the ways we are changed by magic forces that move through our lives. I never know what will come when beginning a painting. It’s a process of co-creation, using water or scribble to create marks and move from there. What emerges is partly choice and partly whatever comes through. I would like my life to be the same – a combination of intention and allowing, where new forms of beauty surprise and delight, and new ways of being are always right around the bend.