Currently I live in the Pacific Northwest in Vancouver, BC. My origins are Long Island, New York, moving upstate to Syracuse to begin my peregrinations. Since then I have lived in Berkeley and San Francisco, Rome, the Loire Valley, Toronto, and Hungary, drawing and painting along the way. The need for roots is a theme I explore in my BC paintings with their scenes depicting the way of life here.
In my art Nature is allowed to play. I feature what we call the nonhuman animals and a few of the higher ones on horseback or inner tubes. Grosbeaks or parrots might stud the sky with their colours, sheep will sometimes fly and cows will graze in flowered Hungarian meadows, no matter what is looming in distant skies, lands or seas.
Environmental concerns and a belief that everything alive shares a unifying commonality, are themes in my work. Lately I have been painting both small and larger works on wood board, using oil, acrylic or mixed media.
Diverse influences inform my art. From my love of the frescoes of Giotto and early Renaissance art, to folk art, colour field paintings, embroidery, and textiles. These might all find their way into my imagination and paintings. This rich historic archive leaves me free to pull together polar images that yield modern and occasionally wry messages.
20% of all proceeds from artwork will be donated towards Bird & Wildlife Conservation.
-Marie H. Becker
Biography
About
Recently I have been spending time with a group of people who support and maintain the Ernest Becker Foundation. The Foundation was created by Neil Elgee, MD. in 1993. The mission of EBF broadly stated is to encourage dialogue on suffering, evil, and the human condition, drawing on Ernest Becker’s works of psychological anthropology including Denial of Death and Escape from Evil.
Contact with this Beckerian community through their educational programs has influenced me to try and describe some of the inquiries and experiences from certain sessions through a portion of my artwork. The appearance of death, the fear of it haunts us like nothing else. Striving to transcend our mortality fears and be a part of something eternal we create immortality projects and hero systems to camouflage what we can’t face and in the process unknowingly create evil , contradiction and sometimes beauty.
The EBF fosters an examination of how we can discover new possibilities of choice and action and new forms of courage and endurance as a way to optimal living.
A popular example of another artist who dramatically throws the truth of the Life Cycle full in his audience’s face is Damien Hirst. Hirst is drawn to the painful subject of death and intuitively he knows we will follow his creativity because we both fear and are fascinated by the complex symbol of Death.
-Marie H. Becker
