About Mary Lou Dauray
Photo by Kim Thompson Steel
Mary Lou Dauray is an award-winning artist, writer, and designer living in Sausalito, California. Her work reflects a life long process of examining Nature with a directional focus on drilling down to the root or essence. This process is married with powerful elements of emotion, feeling, and her concern about the planet.
Dauray has exhibited her work throughout the United States including at the Virginia Museum, Blue Planet juried show sponsored by The Pacific Coast Region of Women’s Caucus for Art, Gallery 111 juried exhibition in Sausalito, CA, and Runnymede Corporate Headquarters, Virginia. Her work is in numerous public collections including the Sophie Davis Medical School, City College of New York, and many private collections. Her work about uranium was chosen to open the 2020 Ploughshares Gala.
Dauray has been instrumental in sponsoring RAW – Recognizing the Art of Women – at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach. In addition, she has helped support the Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach. Further, she has been engaged in the start of a Creative Aging Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Davis School of Gerontology.
Artist’s Statement
“Art has always been my medium to explore the world and myself — it has literally saved my life.”
Creativity across the entire life span, beginning with children, including my own, and our elder community, has been a huge focus and passion. Nature has been my muse and has taken me on an evolutionary journey through many chapters of my life, inspiring me and spurring on my own activism. I have been driven for many years to be a mouthpiece for Mother Nature under peril, expressing the urgent messages I receive from my artistic process.
My process is never repetitive, it’s always an experiment with the mediums of paper, canvas, and wood panels and the use of oil and water-based pigments. My style is ever evolving, evoking a different way of turning the work out.
My work from the past few years has been focused mainly on human-caused climate destruction. I am profoundly alarmed about global warming contributing to massive displacement of people; social injustices; food scarcity; forest fires around the world; rising ocean waters; radioactive pollution, and more.
I have also explored the potential dangers originating from nuclear power plants through my work. There are many who postulate that new nuclear power plants should be a viable source of alternative energy. The effects of the deadly Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown in Japan in March of 2011 caused me to complete a particular series about that disaster. After completing those paintings I delved into a study of uranium in rocks that resulted in a group of paintings I completed on canvas and on mannequin heads.
As we all know, March 2020 will go down in history as a removal from “normal” living. As soon as the shelter-in-place law took effect, I fashioned an 8’ x 8’ sunroom into a studio and immediately found solace and purpose by creating paintings almost every day.
The very first group of artworks I did during the pandemic reflected my worries about the devastating effect of the new rules fomented by the Trump administration that threatened our national parks. During many days I painted vistas of the parks that I had been fortunate enough to visit in 2019. I was so thankful to mentally leave my little studio, just by putting brush to canvas, depicting some of our most beautiful lands.
Recently, my painting has veered more into the abstract and non-objective realm. While I enjoy painting semi-realistic works, creating these abstractions presents an enormous challenge, urging me deeper into a study of the subtle, the essential, and revealing more healing – an evolution from expressing the threats of fire and brimstone.
