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New York native Mary Reilly studied art at SUNY Purchase, the School of Visual Arts, the Art Students League of New York, and the National Academy School of Fine Arts.. She studied with artists Frederick Brosen and Sharon Sprung, who both work with graphite and often in photorealistic styles. Her work has been the subject of seven solo exhibitions in New York City, including Within the Woods: Landscape Drawings by Mary Reilly (2009) at the Museum of the City of New York, and over 25 group shows. Her work is on view in the New York Historical’s exhibition The Art Students League at The New York Historical, on view from March 7, 2025–July 13, 2025 on the Upper West Side. Reilly’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; The New York Historical, New York, NY; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. 

Mary Reilly is devoted to drawing in graphite, her medium of choice. Her labor-intensive process of toning her paper serves as the starting point for her intricate compositions. She begins by using pencil to cover the entire sheet with up to eight uniform, unmodulated layers. This serves as a fertile ground for erasure-made highlights, and inscriptions of rich, velvety shadows. At once additive and subtractive, her technique allows her to create subtle shifts in shade and incremental gradients. As a result, Reilly achieves a myriad of tonal effects, exploring the chromatic spectrum available in a grisaille palette. Her methodology is also spectacularly diverse, allowing her to capture an array of climates and ecosystems–including New York City’s treasure troves of nature, Northern Vermont’s primordial wilderness, and even Hawaii’s balmy coasts–with the same veracity. 

Reilly elides grandeur and minutiae, driving delicate details and staggering, atmospheric elements into the same pictorial plane. She accomplishes this with the use of forced perspective, coupled with a mode of close, decentralized cropping reminiscent of impressionist painting. Though photorealist in nature, this handling of space lends a fantastical quality to Reilly’s drawings; not only dislocating her subjects, but rendering them almost enormous in scale. This is particularly effective in her drawings of blooms, wherein their vivid precision, compression against the very front of the foreground, and surreal atmospheric effects transform the flowers from quotidian to extraordinary. The same is true of the inverse: her more colossal subjects–breaking waves and ancient forests–are reproduced with nearly microscopic specificity. 

ARTIST STATEMENT:

"Since my early childhood, nature has had a profound effect on me in ways that I cherish. The state of mind that is instilled within me by the sights, sounds, and smells - and the sense of nostalgia - when walking through the woods, or on a secluded beach reveals the timelessness and diversity of nature's splendor. The peaceful solitude I find there, the quiet introspection it affords me, and the sense of awe I feel from witnessing nature's determined perseverance against time is so nurturing, uplifting and inspiring. When I draw these scenes and images of nature, all of those thoughts and feelings resurface within me, and I feel centered and peaceful. My intention in sharing my art work is the hope that these images effect the viewer in a similarly positive way.

For my subject matter, I try to find and emphasize the beauty of those locations and images in nature which are often beyond one's passing glance. I generally choose a place that I feel has a tranquil, isolated, and slightly mysterious quality to it as well. For me, working in graphite, using the techniques I've learned and have cultivated over the years, has been extremely gratifying. I tone my paper with up to eight layers of graphite before starting my drawing, taking the surface to a middle tone then pushing the darks and lifting the lights. This process creates subtle shifts in the tone that are in harmonious contrast with the sharpness of the minute details, helping me create a sensuality and a mood in each piece.

Having lived in New York City for more than 20 years and after having found the natural oasis within the woods of Central Park, I decided to research, explore and draw images of the other 4 boroughs. I discovered that there are beautiful ancient forests here with magnificent old trees. There are winding rivers, streams, creeks and marshes, as well as lakes, ponds and miles of sand dune filled beaches. After my New York City series, I moved my family to Northern Vermont where I currently live. Nature is so abundant here with beautiful landscapes right outside my door.  The seasons are more extreme and seasonal transformation now plays an even larger role in the subjects that I choose to draw as do images that I find in warm weather destinations that I travel to." 

-Mary Reilly, 2025