Mary Wilshire is a resident of Croton on Hudson NY currently focusing on expanding her work in Pastel.

Ms. Wilshire received a fine arts degree in painting from Pratt Institute in 1975, but it was her stint as a summertime boardwalk portrait artist in Wildwood New Jersey, which immersed her in the medium of pastel.

After graduating from college she embarked on a professional odyssey spanning a half a dozen different disciplines and 30 years.

From the world of underground comics into mainstream comics with Marvel and DC where she distinguished herself as a woman drawing women in comics, she also worked in publishing for Time-Life Books and Reader’s Digest Books doing editorial illustration. Often she found herself simultaneously creating illustration for publications as diametrically opposed as Good Housekeeping and National Lampoon. She drew the Logo for The Blues Brothers and illustrated over 100 different World Wrestling Federation personalities for use in licensing and merchandising, and produced storyboard art for ad agencies.

On vacations she began to experiment with drawing landscapes in pastel in such locations as the British Virgin Islands, the wilds of Northern Scotland, the rugged coast of Maine and later, her husband’s native Iceland.

When she started her family in the Hudson Valley she found herself falling in love with the pastoral vistas and images of the rivers, valleys and gardens of the area. She began to feel a special interest for home environments, especially rooms steeped in history, or the emotional charge of the primal hearth.

The sepia tinted “Eldhus”(pronounced, “eld’-hoos”, the Icelandic word for kitchen, translated literally as ‘fire-house’) is just such a study. Done on location in one of the buildings at The Icelandic National Arbaersafn (country museum) in Reykjavik, Wilshire chose the room with the rough-hewn walls and ancient looking kitchen implements for it’s powerful feeling of place.

Wilshire freely admits to her lack of tutoring as a pastel artist. She believes that the strength of her work is not in technical virtuosity, but in the emotional, intuitive character of her experience in committing an image to paper.