Seattle is a port town. Mary Iverson’s home. She was lucky enough to have met someone let her into the ports. The cranes in the port are Seatlle red, an orange type red. Mary got hooked on the cranes with the blue sky in the background. That’s when she noticed all the colors in shipping. They use intense colors on the boats, cranes and containers, which caught her attention. Her work got very abstract after a while, being inspired by the lines of stacked containers. That’s where her environmental interest came in. She combined the two, and now her paintings are full of contrast.
She had learned how the economy affects the environment, the water, wildlife and also our national parks. But we don’t see the connection in daily life. So we ignore the impact our lifestyle has on the environment. Maybe we would think and act differently if we saw the connection. To make it visible, she took the containers our of their natural context of the port, and put them in famous national parks.
Mary starts by painting the landscapes, and then adds the containers, using the lines to get the depth right. The lines destroy the image, so how far could she go on adding lines, adding containers, until the painting would be completely destroyed? How long can we go on in the way we are without the world being destroyed?
In Mary’s earlier works the colors are very bold, but she has muted the container colors in the landscape paintings simply to make them fit in. The back ground dictates the colors of the whole. In the future she’ll be making more murals, their large size making them more impressive. And now there’s a shipping container traveling around the world, painted by Mary!
