BIO & SJ

BIO

Vaughan earned an MFA from the Maine College of Art in Portland in 2000, and an MA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 1995. She taught in Princeton, NJ for 13 years before moving to Sonoma County. Her work can be seen in at Plaza Arts Center in Healdsburg, on her website or through a number of juried exhibitions each year.

Born in Nebraska, Mary grew up reading the works of Willa Cather, especially drawn to her stories about artists and sensitivity felt within the opposing worlds of culture and the raw elements of the earth. [A Sculptor’s Funeral (1905), Paul’s Case (1906) Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920)] Her Swedish grandfather drew constantly in a notebook he kept in his back pocket as a carpenter. His small cartoons and etchings of simple animals or faces mesmerized her. Hilding would encourage Mary to build anything she wanted on rainy days in his workshop. After hours of letting her hammer, saw and build, he would open the large garage door like an unveiling and celebrate her wood constructions, made mostly for kittens that were often in abundance.

Raised by a mother who was a librarian and a father who was a printer, there was always literature and large drawing paper at hand. Mary comments on her childhood,

“One’s environment may not cast what a person will become in stone, but it certainly influences direction and how one learns to see. How does a young child not want to draw on large rolls of press paper readily made available? I drew when other kids were watching the Munsters. Even though I was a slow reader, there were good books everywhere in our house. To pick one up and read it, was like discovering a new world. It added a quality of excellence to my ideas. I read Cather, Wharton, Twain, Hawthorne, Thurber, Jewett, O’Connor, Salinger at home…at a fairly early age. I ran around in overalls, yet felt a hidden intellect in me, bucking up against the harsh winter winds and a part of the country that was somewhat isolated from the rest of the world..”