Given that Maria grew up in a small village in Surrey, England, you may think it to be no coincidence that her artwork is primarily landscape focused. Interestingly however, her childhood and teenage years, during which time she was influenced and supported artistically and musically inclined siblings, were actually spent creating figurative portrait based artworks. In fact, it wasn't until years later that Maria began to create the kind of artworks that are presented here within this edition; works which, as we will uncover, have been moulded and are still continually shaped by people and personal connections more so than the natural landscape.
Maria has always harnessed a passion for art for as long as she can remember 'I used to ask my mum to draw me the outline of 'A Lady" on paper which I would then colour in.' she tells me. Later on, Maria would take the lyric books from the CD cases of her favourite bands and paint the faces of the musicians. As we've already touched upon, Maria says she was also lucky to have a family who not only nourished her artistic interests but were also art enthusiasts themselves. 'I remember as a child... my family had a bag full of pipe cleaners, cardboard, tissue paper and empty toilet rolls which we coined the do it bag-it lived in the cupboard under the stairs and would come out on rainy days... I recall vividly looking through my brother's GCSE art projects and being completely in awe as well.
For someone who's adolescence was so dominated by a passion for portraiture, it's interesting to see how her current work is now not only landscape orientated but how the figures within
them are often completely faceless. One of Maria's key springboards toward her style of artwork, however, lies not in art at all- but music. Indeed, as we saw in Edition V :Transformation, with the likes of artist and former band member of 60 Foot Dolls, Carl Bevan, music can often have a profound impact upon how someone creates artistically. Maria moved Surrey to Aberystwyth in order to study Fine Art. Here she not only began to focus upon the more illustrative and digital aspects also started to incorporate musical elements into her work too; a combination which would arguably pave the way to making Maria's artwork into what it is today, as she says:
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