Mary Filapek & Lou Ann Townsend

We have been evolving this magical collaboration for over 20 years. Our current body of work in mixed media is symbolic and allegorical in nature and modernist in style. It represents an effort to explore and map the spaces in between that create connections in our intuitive understanding. Symbols and allegorical meanings are simultaneously universal, personal and evolving. With this work, we seek to inspire and delight the viewer with their own relationship to those symbols and their own deciphering of the allegorical meanings within each piece. A great deal of our studio time is spent milling around, contemplating potential characters and plucking inspirational insight from the ethers. Once we determine a subject and basic outline for a piece, we each take on tasks for laying in and painting the background and creating the characters that inhabit this nexus. Our choice of materials includes acrylic paint with colored pencil, ink and gouache drawings on paper and repurposed star charts, nautical charts, maps and atlases mounted on wood panels. We draw from a rich history of 19th century botanical art and wallpaper, with a modernist sensibility.