Biography
A landscape painter, in addition to illustrating for greeting card companies, Mary Pat Ettinger works with delicate acrylic washes on natural canvas. Light and shadow are implicit to her work in addition to a strong sense of design and shape. Her work expresses a strength of character and openness that comes from living life as an art form itself.
Working both plein air and in the studio, Mary Pat captures the immensity of the Western landscape. Whether painting an ancient cottonwood tree dwarfing shadowed structures and set against massive western mountains, or capturing the lyrical red rock canyons that fill the landscape with a challenge to those bold enough to enter them, Mary Pat brings a sense of the immediate loveliness of the region to whatever she chooses to paint. In a style unique to herself, Mary Pat has honed her skills to bring the warm beauties and colours of the West to her canvases, imbuing them with a sense of tranquility that refreshes the viewer with a sense that beauty is indeed all around us.
Mary Pat trained first in her teens under an Italian artist in oils, and then studied at
Laguna Beach School of Art and at Chapman College. Her works have been published in
various periodicals. She has illustrated several books as well as designed cards for Portal Publications and Crown Point Graphics. She is represented by the Arts at Denver Gallery in Denver, AGO Gallery in Ouray and the Center for the Visual Arts in Steamboat Springs in Steamboat Springs. She was a finalist in the Art Steamboat 2014 – a five state regional art competition. Mary Pat lives with her husband in western Colorado, where they happily find themselves inundated with fruit from their acre of fruit trees, and surrounded by lush pastures grazed by cattle and a myriad assortment of farm animals.
