top of page
BIO

A former landscape designer, antique dealer and house restorer, Mimi Reilly’s hands-on experience building stone walls and laying brick paths allowed her to graduate to interior demolition in her mother’s rehab business. While tearing down a wall she found fragments of an 18th Century mural on the horsehair plaster underneath layers of wallpaper – a discovery that continues to inspire her as she sands and scrapes down her oil paintings to shadows of the original surfaces. Mimi’s paintings are often described as “serene, deep and colorful” but Reilly describes them as lushly minimalistic and intended to reinvigorate the mind and spirit.

 

A 1978 graduate of the Radcliffe Graduate Seminars Program in Landscape and Environmental Design she has studied at MASSART and the Museum School in addition to studio classes painting with artists in Boston and Cape Cod. She has exhibited at the Boston Anthenaeum, Provincetown Art Museum, Castle Hill Encaustics Juried Show in Truro, Cambridge art association and was selected to present at The Anthony Quinn Art Foundation Benefit Auction in Bristol, R.I. in 2009. Mimi was inducted into the National Association of Women Artists in N.Y. in 2010.

 

Visitors are welcome to visit at Open Studios on the 1st Friday of each month from 5pm-9pm or by appointment.
Come on by.

STATEMENT

Central to my oil paintings are the visceral elements of the natural world - the sea, the atmosphere and the earth - often presented in opposition to one another. These juxtapositions are much like the small Japanese gardens I used to design at the cider mill I lived in, with narrow passages flanked by rocks of various sizes casting spectacular shadows with the strong line of the Black Pine bending over and filtering light onto the garden below. These images linger in my memory as I sand and scratch away sections of the lush color I applied to the canvas.

 

The deconstructive process unearths textured origins and contrasts with smoothly painted surfaces.

 

I also incorporate beeswax to produce monoprints. Using a heated steel plate I dip handmade paper through the melting colored beeswax...the process also creates abundant texture but yields a more subdued presentation. I am endlessly and joyfully fascinated by the results of these processes.

bottom of page