In this post, I thought that I would put on my art critic hat and try to provide some background for the gallery entitled “The Door Series”.

Tom and Mary were soul mates and when Tom died in August of 1984, Mary was devastated. The depth of her grief was profound and she never truly recovered from her loss. A series of therapists helped her cope, but she was also on anti-depressant medications for the rest of her life.

I suspect that many artists have some kind of psychic connection to another world and that was certainly the case with Mary. We didn’t discuss it often, but she did tell me, on several occasions, of the times when some of her long-deceased dogs visited her. She also told me that the dog she had after Tom died was sent to her by Tom to protect her.

In the Door Series, Mary seems to be exploring her feelings about Tom’s transition to the “other side”. I do not know who owns the pieces featured in the gallery – perhaps the owners will identify themselves. All I have are some rather poor-quality slides of the pieces. I’ll comment on each piece in the gallery in an attempt to add some context.

No. 1: This piece features three door openings, two of which have doors. All three openings lead to a tree in the distance with a clear path to it. It is possible that in this piece Mary was exploring Tom’s world, as Tom was a bit of a hermit and dearly loved trees.

No. 2: Mary “painted” two female figures in this piece against a bright blue background. One of the figures seems to be her daughter, which she did not have but had fervently wished for before her third son was born.

No. 3: In this one, a louvered door is featured. Louvered doors allow a restricted amount of air to move through them – did Mary complete this piece when she was feeling restricted?

No. 4: This one is very interesting, because it shows a male figure looking into the distance. What I find intriguing about the figure is how awkward and stick-like it is – it is very unlike any other figures that Mary did.

No. 5: Four female figures in a doorway looking back at the viewer. I don’t know what to make of this one.

No. 6: A blue doorway with a good portion of the blue space taken away by a white field. This piece is a tile with an added area of white slip under a manganese wash.

No. 7: Two female figures who appear to be Catholic nuns. Mary was Protestant, not Catholic, so I’m not sure what to make of these figures. Perhaps she was exploring traditional religious themes of the afterlife, though she was by no means a traditionally religious person.

No. 8: A farm field with a blue sky and a bright sun viewed through a doorway. Was this what she thought Heaven might be?

No. 9: A hallway with two doors and a shadowy figure at the end. It is interesting that the first door has glass in it and the second door doesn’t. If it does, the glass is tinted so that nothing can be seen through it. A very interesting piece.

No. 10: This piece was done with underglaze pencil and looks back to the Key West House series that she did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I find it interesting because it portrays a balcony looking out to either sea or sky, but probably sky, since there is a light spot in the middle of the background.

No. 11: This one is very intriguing – it appears to be almost Venetian in that there is a gondola in the foreground and two tunnel-like passages in a wall with hanging clothes on it. Mary was a world traveler, but she had never been to Italy. The closest she got to Italy was Spain.

No. 12: This one seems to have been made at about the same time as No. 4. Again, a very awkward, stick-like male figure against a blue background. The arms of the figure are really child-like in their execution. Intriguing.

No. 13: Perhaps this one was done at the same time as No. 10. It, too, is done in underglaze pencil and I find her creation of the balcony through the glass door to be quite a feat. A hazy tree in the distance against a background of blue completes the composition.

No. 14: I’m not sure that this piece belongs in this gallery, but I thought that since it had what appear to be the outlines of doors in it that it did. I don’t quite know what to make of it.

No. 15: This piece was probably created in the mid-1990s because it features the use of paper applied to the ceramic after the piece was fired. Without a better picture of it or, better yet, being able to see it in person, I can’t provide much more information about it. I have other pieces of hers in which she uses paper, beads, and even wood – painted and unpainted – in her compositions. I expect that this is a later piece because it doesn’t seem to depict the psychic torture that she was undergoing in the immediate years after Tom’s death.

No. 16: Another piece with added paper and acrylic paint, probably from the mid-1990s.

No. 17: This piece is in the collection of Leonard Davenport Fine Arts, in Bridgehampton, NY. It was most likely also created in the mid-1990s. The blue glaze is cobalt and the speckled effect was caused by incomplete mixing of the cobalt colorant with the base glaze.

No. 18: Another piece in the collection of Leonard Davenport Fine Arts. This one is rather interesting, in that it features steps up to the doorway, which has two outward-swinging doors, almost church-like, except they are not rounded at the top, as church doors often are. The abstract view through the doorway is also interesting in that it appears to reflect the modest healing that Mary had achieved by this time. She is no longer focusing on mysterious views or abstract trees and fields.

There are quite a number of these pieces in the collections of people who bought her work – many more than are featured in this gallery – but I do not know where they are. Perhaps the owners of them, if they stumble across this website, will volunteer more information and photographs.