Mary Segal begins her day as an artist in her garden, the source of not only her morning exercise – and occasional lunchtime salad – but also her inspiration.
In the backyard of her Roseland home of two decades, off an out-of-the-way dirt road, she intersperses the rows of arugula, kale and yellow beans with zinnia and marigolds. The shrub-like eggplant offers up simple lavender blooms before fruiting; tomato plants, when Segal snips off an errant shoot, scent the air. Mango and avocado trees are quickly filling in, and Segal imagines the day they will tower over the rest. “I may not be around, but who cares?” says Segal, who is now a great-grandmother.
The garden is also her art supply shop, where she plants, prunes and plucks the actual media for her painted collages. She then dries the petals and leaves until brittle and colorless, then restores them with her paintbrush to a beauty nature never knew.
“I do it very intuitively,” she says. “The painting just suggests itself to you, which is the part that is just fabulous.”
Friday, Segal’s latest painted collages will be on view at the Center for Spiritual Care, a few blocks north of Vero’s downtown public library. Like the other exhibitions staged at the center over the past year or so, her show is expected to draw a warm throng of supporters, both fellow artists and patrons. Like Segal’s garden, the center’s artist receptions have proven nurturing beyond measure, inspiring and through its sales funding the work of top Vero independent artists.
And Segal herself has done her share of nurturing artists. In 2012, Segal and Sebastian artist Sharon Morgan organized the first Sebastian Art Studio Tour. Once again, her studio will be on the tour, scheduled for Feb. 11.
Segal is a longtime instructor at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. Though she has limited her course offerings since opening Red Door Studios, a teaching space, in her home two years ago, she is offering a one-day workshop April 1 at the museum on the use of acrylic mediums and gels.
Developing her own knowledge of those techniques has been the focus of her artistic life lately. The products range from transparent or iridescent glazes to high-solids gel that can be manipulated as it dries – shaped, carved or even stamped. She also uses interference colors that change tone as the viewer passes by, from green to violet, for example.
“It can be daunting to figure out,” she says. “There’s a lot of shine in my new paintings, a lot of gloss medium and a lot of layers of color so you build that beautiful glow. It looks like they’re lit from behind.”
Often, it is the gels that lend the mystical air to the floral paintings. Her latest series has veered away from the patterns she was laying out a few years back and now involve more abstract composition.
“It’s always an adventure. I will just have a germ of an idea, it might be a color or just a gesture, not fleshed out at all. I know I get very excited about the flowers’ forms and shapes, then I just start building a painting.”
Segal, who earned a degree in art history from Brown University in 1955 while studying studio art at the nearby Rhode Island School of Design, is best known for her mixed media. Her “altered books” were the subject of an earlier course at the museum. In it, she shared various methods of transforming books, including journals, into sculptures with glue or paint, or creating new “books” by pasting clippings of printed words or images onto a canvas, and embellishing them with script or painted designs. Years earlier a variation on the concept earned her a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She spent five years keeping journals of musings and drawings; the resulting assemblage went on to be shown in a number of venues, including the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.
Segal, whose late husband was a sculptor, briefly lived as part of the community at nearby Kashi Ashram when she first moved to the area in the 1980s. She still drops in for dinners on occasion and is impressed with the Ashram’s sustainable gardening program, which offers workshops to the public.
Daughter of a journalist, Segal had grown up in Cleveland, then after college moved to Munich with her first husband. Six years later, in the 1960s, the couple moved to San Francisco where Segal got a job in advertising; she showed her artwork in various galleries while making her home in Berkeley. From there, she moved to rural New Mexico with her new husband, the sculptor. For a year, she taught English at an alternative school and remains close to her students even today. “Everything was experiential,” she says with exuberance. “We went on field trips and we made things and the parents came in and taught their skills. We had a fabulous year with them.”
The couple arrived in Florida just as the Vero Beach Museum of Art was opening its doors. Segal became an integral part of establishing a print-making studio there, teaching a number of classes including some for children.
Around 1990, Segal made a commitment to her art-making. She left the ashram and spent two weeks at Penland School of Crafts in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville. “It was very important to me once I’d dedicated my life to art.”
A decade later, when the Center for Spiritual Care opened in 2000, its offerings, mostly workshops in spiritual and psychologist growth, were a natural fit for Segal. Today founder Ludwig, along with her husband Warren Obluck, the longtime film studies director at Vero’s art museum, have helped curate and promote the dozen or so exhibits to date, all involving respected local artists.
“They’ve been wonderful,” says Segal. “They take very good care of their artists. They came out to my studio, they really looked at my work, and Warren wrote this wonderful essay about where it all fits in the stream of art.”
The reception for Segal is Friday from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Her works will be on view through the month of January. The Center for Spiritual Care is at 1550 24th Street, Vero.