Cover Story | By PAMELA DEY VOSSLER | photo by: BAMBI RIEGEL | riegelpictureworks.com
Mary Morant (left) and Elizabeth Higgins (Betsy Jones)
THERE ARE AS MANY ROADS TO BECOMING AN ARTIST as there are artists, and two of Darien’s best – abstract artist Elizabeth Higgins (Betsy Jones) and realist painter Mary Morant – are a case in point. One came to art by way of happenstance—her father, an endocrinologist, had hoped she would pursue a medical career; the other by way of a a gig rendering sketches for skiwear designer Nome Obermeyer in Aspen, CO. Both paint in oil but one has an MFA in painting, the other a BFA in graphic design.
…and as with their differing paths, no two artists are the same. How could they be? Art is as distinctive as DNA, no lines, palettes or subjects the same, a reflection of the unique lens through which each artist sees the world and the life they absorb into their work. It is, after all, the variations in how we see things—the angle, tilt and color, the shading and cadence, that make art – and life – interesting, if we’re paying attention.
The thing about art is it makes us look. When it is good, really good, it tells us something, it connects us, challenges us, takes us deeper, makes us better; it makes us feel—which the work of Betsy and Mary most certainly does.
What binds these two—and all artists, despite their differences, is the call to create. It pours from them. Here are their stories.
Two Best Friends, oil on linen, 18 x 24 / courtesy Mary Morant
MARY MORANT:
Limning in the Real World
FOR MARY MORANT, paint, canvases, brushes and easels were part of her everyday growing up in Alabama and Georgia with a noted portrait artist mother who studied at the Tyler School of Fine Art in Philadelphia.
“She was always painting,” said Mary of her mom, H.H. Means. “Our house had paintings everywhere. Her art filled our walls. So painting was a part of me from the beginning,” she continued.
Opening Lines
Though pulled to painting and drawing herself “ever since I can remember,” said Mary, she chose to major in graphic design at the University of Georgia where she earned her BFA, thinking commercial art would provide better career options after college. And for a while, it did—in Aspen where she sketched those Obermeyer designs and created silk screens for T-shirts, and then in New York City (NYC) as an art director on the IBM business at Lord, Geller Federico and Einstein, one of the hottest agencies at the time. Part of the conceptual team working on IBM’s iconic Charlie Chaplin campaign—for which she and her group earned a Clio, the Oscar of advertising, Mary hired and steered teams of directors, photographers, stylists and actors at shoots around the world.
Beach Treasure, oil on linen, 18 x 24 / courtesy Mary Morant
But the call to fine art was loud, loud enough to rouse her before dawn every day for years in Manhattan. She’d start with a 6am swim at the Vanderbilt Y then walk to her agency job at 60th & Madison. After work, she spent four hours at the Art Students League on 57th street painting and learning what she would have during her undergrad years had she majored in fine art rather than graphic design.
“Where did I get that energy?” laughed Mary at the memory of midnight walks back to her apartment after class.
It was part of the training that landed her where she is today – an award-winning painter regularly commissioned to create art for a growing list of clients. Her non-commissioned paintings are for sale through Geary Gallery at 576 Post Road in Darien, Sandra Morgan Interiors in Greenwich and at her studio in Darien, as well as when she exhibits locally.
Through Lines
Mary and Ueli, her husband at the time, who she met and married in NYC in the mid-eighties, moved to Darien after Charlie, the first of their three children, was born. Next came Lukas then Kate and a move to Paris. While there, Mary studied at the Musée du Louvre.
“We would go through the Louvre, pick a painting and then we’d have to copy it,” explained Mary of how emerging fine artists establish foundational knowledge. At first, she spoke not a word of French but she understood what she was learning.
Three years later, fluent in French with more basics of creating fine art under her belt, Mary returned to Darien with her family. Eight months later, they were back in Europe, Amsterdam this go ‘round, where she quickly found master teacher Marike Bok and her studio at The Hague.
Great Blue Heron, oil on linen, 30 x 40 / courtesy Mary Morant
“I studied with her for three years,” said Mary. “She made us work in black and white for a year. No color, no painting. She said you have to learn your values,” she recalled. Though Marike spoke no English, Mary got the message as is so evident in the balance of light and shadow that marks her work today, even as she continues on what has become a lifelong trajectory of learning and stretching herself in new directions.
“Though I remain committed to capturing the realism of my subjects,” said Mary of the style engrained during all those years growing up with her mom’s art, “my work has increasingly moved toward abstraction,” she added, explaining her pull in recent years toward printmaking, collage and what she calls palette paintings – abstract renderings of the colors used for a given painting.
“I’m always learning,” said Mary. When you’re as creative as she is, it’s no wonder. “It’s not like I can turn it off,” she acknowledged. (Just ask her kids about the themed birthday parties of their early years, the ebony-stained kitchen floors of their home on McLaren Road South and the wax paper their mom took to the yellow kitchen walls to create an antique, Provençal look—authentic, old and artistic, just the way she likes it.)
Between the Lines
Inspired by the careful, classical drawings and realism in 17th century Dutch still life paintings, the landscapes of Corot and the portraits of John Singer Sargent, Mary’s work radiates beauty, bone-deep, and the many layers within it. In fact, every corner of her life does.
“Everything we do is art,” observed Mary—our homes, what we collect (like the acorns and shells and rocks and books and papers and tortoise shells and all manner of nature that fill every corner of her studio), what we read, how we communicate, a small bound book of favorite quotes and work (like the gem Mary recently self-published) …even the way we might produce a Trident Mint ad (for which Mary departed the beaten path to hire a non-commercial museum-quality photographer to assure her vision. “I wanted it to be beautiful,” Mary said. It was.)
She paints the coast, the sea and all around it, on it and within it. Even when there is no water depicted on a piece of art she has created, you can sense its presence. Her paintings give us a way to be in the world, to bring the peace of our favorite places and the best ways to feel into any moment.
As Mary says in her artist statement, “I seek to add to the silence, not fill it.”
Ironically, at the center of all this calm and beauty is Mary’s drive to do more. There is an urgency about her even as she slows to find the patience to work, following a disciplined routine in and around the family-first life she leads with her children and grandchildren. “I have so much I want to do. There’s no time to do it all,” said Mary who dreams of an exhibit devoted solely to the sea and its many gifts.
In her artist statement, Mary describes her work as “a practice that demands focus, balance and patience, a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege.”
Oh those crooked lines that lead straight to our greatest passions, and one of the biggest lessons of all: The beauty of trying, of pushing our boundaries, of heeding our truest call.
For more about Mary, visit marymorant.com
Women At The Window, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 / courtesy Elizabeth Higgins
ELIZABETH HIGGINS (BETSY JONES):
Luminescence: Finding the Light
Betsy Jones – who paints under her maiden name, Elizabeth Higgins, would rather paint than talk about the how and why of her art. “I think my art should speak for itself,” she said, though she did concede, art “makes her whole. There’s an innate inner need for me to do this,” she added, though it took a while to realize just how much.
First Light
Betsy grew up in Toronto, the middle of nine children, drawing under the eaves in her third-floor bedroom when she wasn’t doing the homework that helped her become valedictorian of her class. She didn’t “officially” discover art until her last year in high school when she happened by Mrs. Cunningham’s art class in the basement of the private all-girls Catholic school she attended. (Betsy’s parents, well-traveled and devoted to the performing arts, gave their children dance and music lessons but “rarely took us to art museums,” Betsy said.)
Mrs. Cunningham, a Yale-trained artist as it turned out, invited her in, saw her ability and asked her to stay. Mesmerized, she did, and basically never left. Lacking the prerequisites to take Mrs. Cunningham’s class for credit, she was allowed to audit it and, at her teacher’s behest, made her first visit to an exhibit of fine art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. “I was blown way. Everything resonated with me,” said Betsy.
She took night classes offered by the public school system to earn the credits she needed to apply to a fine art program. She was admitted to Queens University in Ontario where she earned her BFA in art, music and literature.
Caledon Fields, oil on canvas, 6 x 9 / courtesy Elizabeth Higgins
After college, Betsy received a Helena Rubinstein Scholarship Award to pursue an MFA at
Parsons School of Design in New York City (NYC). There, she studied with renowned artists Leland Bell, Paul Resika, John Heliker, Stanley Lewis and Robert DeNiro, Sr. and earned an MFA in painting—a source, ultimately, of great pride for her father.
Needing a job following graduation, she spent four years working at Lord & Taylor designing ads for The New York Times. Meanwhile, she continued to paint at a studio she shared with a Parsons classmate on Duane Street in NYC, submitting her work to galleries in hopes of a show. Success came early. The Prince Street Gallery bit. Barbara Ingber, who owned the Ingber Gallery on West Broadway, saw her work there and invited her to show at her gallery. A gallerist visiting from Canada asked to represent Betsy in Toronto.
The Light Refracted
“I was working a lot,” said Betsy, still grateful for these early breaks. She married Bill, her husband of 43 years, in 1984. They’d met her second day in NYC. In 1990, they moved to Darien, where Bill had grown up. She continued to paint after her son William was born in 1991, and after her second child, Julia, arrived. Her twins – Catherine and Elizabeth were born in 1996. The paintbrush stilled as she traded the pressure of gallery showings for being a mom. “I let things lie and I worked very hard at being a mom,” said Betsy.
Still, the canvas called, whispering to her in various small projects – for friends and fundraisers. Then William suffered a severe lacrosse injury requiring surgery. What began as a prescription to manage his pain after the surgery evolved into a lifelong struggle with addiction.
“I think it was in me,” explained Betsy of her return to her studio, “and I think maybe I needed it because I was so worried about my son. And then it just gave me purpose.”
As William struggled, he encouraged his mom to paint, particularly when she considered foregoing art to pursue a degree in psychology or social work to better help her son.
“You are an artist mom,” Betsy recalled him saying. “You have to paint. What would the world be without art or artists? It would be a wasteland.”
Those were the words that roused her from the crushing grief that followed his death from an overdose in 2018. A thriving, second-year law student when he died, he’d been winning the battle against his disease, literally saving lives as he fought for his. It is his wisdom, his heart, her gratitude for the years she had with him, as well as her husband and her daughters with their expanding lives that lead her forward now, giving her the inspiration and impetus to pursue her painting—which has earned her renewed renown in the years since William died.
“Art is the greatest form of hope,” said Betsy quoting German artist Gerhard Richter.
How the Light Gets In
In Betsy’s art, “rooted as it is in traditions stemming from Courbet, Derain, Bonnard, Matisse, Morandi, German Expressionism, the Canadian Group of Seven, her teachers and contemporary artist Peter Doig,” (so says her artist statement), you sense a light down deep brought to the surface through abstract renderings of landscapes and figures. Void of defining detail yet simultaneously full of it, her paintings leave ample space for anyone who sees them to fill in the blanks as they will.
“It is the in-between, the hovering between representation and abstraction, that interests her, not the labeling effect of details,” her artist statement also says of the poetry you cannot help but feel in her work. “Instead, she aims directly at the spirit of the painting – of making something come to life,” the statement continues.
How The Light Gets In, oil on canvas, 14 x 11 / courtesy Elizabeth Higgins
In her training, she learned the rules of painting in order to break them, developing a creative certainty that sees her through the self-doubt experienced by every great artist; powers her willingness to risk and evolve (“You have to risk. It’s part of the process,” she said); silences the inner voices that can threaten to block her—including her own (“Sometimes it just comes out of me and I’ll look and say, how did I do that?” she said of her art); and gives her a way to progress from one mark on the canvas to the next.
“I’ve learned not to be so hard on myself,” said Betsy. “If (a painting) doesn’t happen right away. I know eventually it will,” she continued. She trusts her process. She’s does the work, she has the gift.
Betsy currently is represented by the Cavalier Gallery in NYC, Greenwich, Nantucket and Palm Beach, The Prince Street Gallery, NYC and has exhibited at The George Billis Gallery. She is also a member of The Silvermine Guild of Artists. Find her online at elizabethhigginsartist.com and cavaliergalleries.com/artist/Elizabeth_Higgins.
