At 76, painter Mary Sprague seems to be picking up speed, moving from chickens to trees to rhinoceroses like a hopped–up naturalist. “I’m doing it better now,” she says. “I’m finally catching on.”
The public concurs. Ms. Sprague’s show several years ago of large-scale, delightful chickens, at Duane Reed Gallery, sold out. Her show this past fall, also at Duane Reed, was of similarly large and wonderful paintings of rhinoceroses. Ms. Sprague discovered those animals on a visit she made last year to the Saint Louis Zoo, intending to draw its elephants.
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Now she’s wondering what will follow a horned ungulate, and making some smaller, porcelain rhinos, in the three-story building on North Compton Avenue where she lives and has her studio spaces on the upper two floors. Along with her artwork and furniture, there are, among other things, an art-festooned solarium, a deep bathtub on a platform in her ceramics studio, a stuffed chicken, and toy elephants. A mechanical lift in her third-floor studio helps her reach the top of her very large paintings. The views are picturesque in an urban way, like something Edward Hopper might have painted. Her mother, who was also a painter, happens to have counted Hopper among her favorites. “I’ve done some drawings from the roof and things like that,” Ms. Sprague says, “but I’ve never gotten really into the cityscapes.”
Tucked away in a corner of her living space is a brightly colored drawing she made when she was a child, of a Memorial Day parade in Marblehead, Mass., with houses, a clock tower, soldiers, prancing horses, an antique fire engine, and her dog. “I was ambitious. I wanted to put everything in,” Ms. Sprague says. “I’ve always been an artist.”
She came to St. Louis from California in 1965 and taught art at St. Louis Community College–Meramec for 30 years. Along the way, she reared four children. Lately, her art has moved through a horse period, a chicken period, a tree period, and a rhinoceros period, the last of which might or might not be over. “I don’t think ahead,” she says. “I just don’t let that happen. I don’t want to jinx it. But I think I want to do some more interiors now.”
Early on, she dabbled briefly in abstract expressionism. “It’s not hard to make an abstract expressionist picture,” she says, “but to understand what you’re doing, to have that angst, that wasn’t it for me.”
Since then, she has more or less begun, at least, with tangible things. Something is missing, she says, “when you don’t have some hooks to reality in there.”
More of Mary Sprague’s art can be viewed at her website. Her work is represented by Duane Reed Gallery.
