About The Artist

Mary Vaughan is an abstract, yet narrative painter whose work exudes a strong painterly quality and a fascination with nature, land forms and earth entities. Vaughan strives to evoke meaning beyond the obvious with visual metaphor. Vaughan holds an MA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Maine College of Art in Portland. She has worked as a full time painter in Santa Rosa, California since 2001. Raised in Nebraska by a father whose love for old fonts and color as a commercial printer and a mother whose literary interests ignited intellectual thinking, Vaughan continues to nurture her ties to the Midwest and lives part of each year in Santa Rosa and Hastings, Nebraska where she was born and raised. The piece entitled "love cell," submitted for this Corona Virus call for entries is based on the idea that all natural matter, matters. Here, a human white blood cell, a hydrangea and a sea urchin mix into one connected living orb, communicating the subtle idea that the earth is part of us and when it is not taken care of, all living things, suffer the consequences.