Meet Artist Mary Emery

Portland USA (2021), 8″H x 6″W, etching and collage.

Rainbow Fleet (2024), 6″H x 6″W, oil on panel, nine panels.

The Flower Box (2020), 4″H x 4″W, pen and ink on wood.

Austin’s Topo (2014), 8″H x 12″W, etching.

Topless in the Fog (2020), 4″H x 12″W, oil on panel.

Beach 30 (2021), 4″H x 12″W, oil on panel.

Typical Cross Section (2022), 22″H x 15″W, etching.

Penwork Ceiling Detail (2014), 40″H x 72″W, pen and ink on canvas installed on ceiling.

The artist’s plein air setup.

Artists often feel pressure to build a brand, a style, a distinctive look. And once that brand starts paying the bills, there’s more pressure to keep doing it, at the expense of exploring other styles or methods.

Mary Emery, however, is happy to be diverse. She has transformed the top of a wooden box with what looks like inscribed ivory but is actually white shellac painted with decorative lines, curlicues, and quotations, as if it had been made by a whaler in 1810. She uses her father’s old mylar engineering plans, together with street maps and naval charts, to produce very modern prints. And she lives on Nantucket, where she is surrounded by so much inspiring scenery that she can’t resist painting landscapes and an island obsession, the summer jeep.

All this inclusion derives from childhood. Emery’s mother belonged to the Historical Society of Early American Decoration and taught classes in such traditional techniques as reverse painting on glass and wall stenciling. Her father, when he wasn’t making drawings for his job as a civil engineer, painted with oils and watercolors, drew with pastels, and carved scrimshaw—his only goals enjoyment and mastery. So even after Mary earned an MFA in printmaking from Pratt Institute, she did a little of everything, from making signs to painting sisal rugs for interior designers. Today, she serves as the chair of education for the Nantucket Historical Association.

You can put your drink down on one of her favorite projects, at a restaurant in Nantucket called the Òran Mór. The owners originally asked Emery to cover the bar surface with a faux finish—another of her skills—but when they saw her penwork, the historic decoration she’d learned from her mother, they asked for that instead. The result looks like antique parchment decorated with flourishes, fancy borders, and those quirky porpoises and wind-blowing angels you see on the edges of very old maps. To this she added a little feminism in the form of actual quotations from a whaler’s wife, who wrote, “When he says, ‘Goodbye my love, I’m off across the sea,’ first I’ll cry for his departure, then I’ll laugh because I’m free.”

Emery approaches art as an opportunity to make and master whatever strikes her fancy at the time. “I think the main thing that drives me,” she says, “is that it’s fun.”

Editor’s note: To see more of Mary Emery’s work, visit maryemerydesign.com.