Today we’d like to introduce you to Mary Ahern

Hi Mary, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?

I am living the dream. Currently, I am a working artist showing my work in a great array of venues and connected to a community of other professional women artists who share their work and support each other’s efforts. As a way of paying it forward, I am the Chair of Public Relations for the National Association of Women Artists, which was established in 1889 and is the first professional women’s artist organization founded in the US. Now I can use my extensive marketing experience to help empower other women artists by promoting their work and to help them develop the skills needed to advance themselves towards their own personal goals.

My path, like many others, has been circuitous. As a newly single parent of two young sons, creating oil paintings in my studio was not going to generate enough income to put food on the table and pay the mortgage. I zigged and zagged, gaining the necessary education to put me in a position to maintain and exceed the lifestyle I had experienced as a child and wanted for my sons. With a BA in Fine Art, I turned to computer programming to exercise my left/right brain imbalance. One of my mentors, my boss Martha Green, director of Career Services at Barnard College, advised me to follow where the money is made in a company if I wanted to be financially successful. I decided that if I couldn’t be home to give milk and cookies to my sons at three o’clock when school was over, I would make as much money as I could to justify our loss.

So in the early 1980s, I followed the money into sales and marketing and chose the computer industry as the up-and-coming path. To satisfy my creative side, I specialized in selling computer graphics equipment, electronic paint systems, and character generators. I used my artist’s skills to demonstrate these entirely new creative tools to the engineers and creatives in the broadcast television and production industries.
Eventually, as I define it, I got a concussion on the glass ceiling so started my own graphic design business catering to the industry contacts I developed over the years. Since I knew the flow of the industry and spoke the technical jargon, I was able to create all the sales and marketing materials for my engineering clients. As an early adopter, I began repurposing their content for the brand-new internet having built my first website in 1995, the year after the internet came into public use.

Fast forward. Now, I’m using all these skills and experience to empower other women artists. As Chair of PR, I volunteer my time to the National Association of Women Artists. Our committee is made up of a team of dedicated women who help to promote the organization and the professional women who are members.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

No one has a smooth road in my opinion. Being taken seriously in a tech industry populated almost exclusively by men in the 1980s was a considerable challenge. I found that I had to develop a very thick skin in order to survive and be successful. As one of the very few women doing what I was doing, I had to be twice as informed, three times as productive, and four times more aggressive than any of the men I competed with in sales. The good news is that I rose to the challenge and was compensated accordingly with a lucrative commission structure. The hard work I put in, paid off.

Another challenge I encountered was keeping my personal creative life active. Often I took my drawing supplies on the road and after seeing clients, went to my hotel room and drew. When I couldn’t, I read books about art, art history, and individual artists. I still read with this focus. It is central to who I am as a human being a creative soul.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?

After closing my commercial businesses in 2017 at age 70, I returned to my first love – oil painting. As a passionate gardener, my artwork is deeply inspired by the lessons and metaphors found in the garden, which I see as a microcosm of the universe itself.

With boldness in color & scale my art summons, with seeming simplicity, the complex questions of existence and purpose. The flowers in my paintings represent a microcosm of the universe in their families and community as well as their quest for survival, eventual senescence, and rebirth.

My paintings explore the interconnectedness and balance found both in the vast cosmos and in the ephemeral beauty of a flower interacting with a butterfly, calling attention to the fragility of our existence.

With a duality of macro and micro vision, my flowers invite the viewer to see, larger than life, the intricacy and purpose of their existence. And in their boldness, I suggest a contemplation of their relevance and ours in the social order of our universe.

We can learn everything we need to know about building communities by studying the complexity of growth and survival in our gardens and recognizing the vastness of our universe. My art is inspired by my garden and by the images gathered by NASA of the cosmos. The balance and fragility of both these micro and macro universes teach us the lessons we need in order for humanity to survive and prosper.

What does success mean to you?

Finding balance in one’s life is my measurement of success. For me that has been the balance between self-care and the concern for others. I have managed to build a life, through the ability to switch gears when needed, to refocus and reframe situations both good and bad, and to do it through my own personal passions of art and gardens. My creative self has helped immeasurably with my ability to think outside the box for solutions. The garden is the center of my spiritual self, my place of meditation, and my calmness.

A key part of my success is paying forward my experience to help other women artists achieve their goals. As much as one gives, the rewards are exponentially increased in what one receives. I treasure the community and mutual support of my women friends.

Without the right life partner, my success would not be shining quite so brightly. My hubby Dave accepts unquestionably my choices and commitments. He is the greatest cheering section a person could possibly have. We found each other later in life and have built an immensely important partnership that catapults each of us toward our own measurements of success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://maryahernartist.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maryahern
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MaryAhernArtist
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/maryahernartist
• Other: https://www.pinterest.com/maryahernartist

Image Credits

2 photos by Len Marks Photography. The Personal Profile photo and the photo with my hubby Dave and I on the bridge in the garden.

All others by Mary Ahern