Mary Jane Q CROSS, 1951 ✿

Angelo mio
sento il tuo profumo nell'aria
volteggiarmi nel tuo spirito respiro
Ora, sento la tua anima
stringersi a me
nel tuo abbraccio così celestiale
e miracoloso...
Sembra caduto dal cielo!

~ Catherine La Rose©2022 ~

Mary Jane Q Cross is an American realist artist born in 1951. Mary Jane resides in Newport NH with her husband Mark Cross. Mary Jane's desire to make beautiful things began a serious journey to live an artist's life by age 8.

In 1970-1973 studies at the Worcester Art Museum School in Worcester MA began her insatiable appetite for museums, galleries , biographies, paintings and then their storytelling in paint. Cross found the season of expressionism of the 70's to fall short of the academic skills that were desired. So, shortly after graduation she patterned a curriculum for herself and a few students after the French Academic Painters, and the Pre Raphaelites.

Mary Jane is at her best as she spiritually entwines poetry with her comely treatment of the figure as the Pre Raphaelites did in their ability to tell stories. Her desire that 3 lifetimes would perhaps enable her to paint only half the paintings in her personal vision yet ahead, lead her to know her Creator's eternity as a most welcome eventuality.

Strong prayerful women, scenes of tranquility, and a quiet stillness have perhaps come from a rest that bodily eludes her. It is evident that she has an interior tranquility that has become a comforting theme that is powerful, as a visual reprieve, in our busy culture. It is said by Mary Jane about her work, "Always learning and never reaching, keeps me, ever the contemplative painter, longing to paint the next tender work...and then by God's grace, the next."