Mary Ann Davis
Plein Air Painter · Indianapolis to the Rockies · Oil and Pastel
Mary Ann Davis (born 1954) is an Indianapolis painter whose reputation rests on working outdoors, directly in front of her subject, in oil and pastel. askART describes her as an award-winning Indiana artist who paints and draws from life each week and regularly works en plein air. Over two decades of juried shows, competitions and gallery representation, she has become one of the recognised names in the contemporary plein air movement of the Midwest, with a reach that extends to Colorado, Florida and the national exhibitions of the American Impressionist Society.
A Printmaker's Training
Davis studied at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, graduating in 1976 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in lithography. A printmaker's discipline, with its attention to value, drawing and the deliberate placement of every mark, underlies the confident structure of her later paintings. She went on to study painting with Antonius Raemaekers, Lois Griffel and Carolyn Anderson, teachers associated with the colour-driven, impressionist approach to outdoor painting.
Two Careers
From 1978 Davis worked as a graphic designer, and in 1991 she founded her own studio, Davis Graphic Design. For many years painting ran alongside that practice. In 2019 the Indianapolis public broadcaster WFYI profiled her move from graphic design into painting full time, noting her work coordinating events with the Indiana Plein Air Painters Association and the Hoosier Salon.
Painting Indiana
Her standing in her home state is well attested. In 2004 her painting Kelly Hill Vista won the T. C. Steele Great Outdoors paint competition, an event named for the most celebrated of the Hoosier Group painters. She was one of ten artists chosen for Painting Indiana: The Changing Face of Agriculture, the second volume of a state-supported project that produced a traveling exhibition and a book from Indiana University Press. She has been a member of the Brown County Art Guild since 2011, holds the juried designation of Indiana Artisan, and in 2020 showed Circle View and Franklin County Courthouse in the Historic Indiana en plein air exhibition at the Indiana State Museum.
Beyond the Midwest
Davis's work has not stayed at home. She is a signature member of the American Impressionist Society and a signature member of Plein Air Artists Colorado, whose 2020 national exhibition gave her an Award of Merit for the oil Mosquito Creek. In 2017 her work was juried into the National Oil and Acrylic Painters' Society Best of America exhibition, and she has been represented by Mary Williams Fine Arts in Boulder, Colorado, and Sheldon Fine Arts in Naples, Florida, as well as the Hoosier Salon galleries in Indianapolis and New Harmony. Her paintings have appeared in Plein Air Magazine, American Art Review, The Pastel Journal and Southwest Art. That record of western exhibition gives context to a desert canvas carrying her full name.
Colour, Light and Atmosphere
Davis paints alla prima, wet into wet, beginning with small thumbnail sketches to settle values and composition. Her palette, as she has described it, turns on lemon and cadmium yellow, light red, quinacridone rose, King's and ultramarine blue and mineral violet, and she favours angled brushes for their variety of line and edge. She names Will Vawter, Frank Duveneck, Wayman Adams, William Merritt Chase, Edward Potthast and John Singer Sargent among her influences. The clear blues, lavender mountains and rose-violet verbena of our desert sit comfortably within that vocabulary of colour.
Why Mary Ann Davis Matters
Davis belongs to a generation that revived the outdoor tradition of the Hoosier Group and the American impressionists and carried it into national competition. Fellow artists, in the words of one of her galleries, call her work beautiful and masterful, and she is known as a generous teacher. askART records auction sales of her work, including Indiana subjects such as Hay Bales in Belmont, Indiana and Nature Park, Zionsville. For collectors, her paintings offer the immediacy of work made in the open air by a painter with a documented record of juried recognition.
A Life in the Record
Born; askART records her birth year.
BFA in lithography, Herron School of Art, Indianapolis.
Begins a career in graphic design; founds Davis Graphic Design in 1991.
Kelly Hill Vista wins the T. C. Steele Great Outdoors paint competition.
Joins the Brown County Art Guild.
Juried into the NOAPS Best of America exhibition, Fort Wayne.
Award of Merit, Plein Air Artists Colorado national exhibition, for Mosquito Creek.
A signed desert landscape enters the Eclection in Reno.
Mary Ann Davis paints the way the best of the plein air tradition taught: outdoors, with colour carrying the structure. Her recognition in Indiana and in Colorado's national plein air exhibition shows a painter at home in open western country as well as Hoosier farmland. A desert in bloom under a clear spring sky is exactly the kind of light she has spent her career chasing.Viridian Eclection, Reno
Inquire About Available Works
Works by Mary Ann Davis come to the Eclection one at a time. If you own a work by Mary Ann Davis, or have letters, photographs or papers connected with the artist, we would like to hear from you.
