Claiming that her paintings are about mortality, Mary Weatherford turns to the Californian landscape as her muse, translating its bright and moody colors, tangled vegetation, and weathered coastline licked by the changing sea into expressively painted abstract and representational compositions. These scenes serve as vehicles for her explorations of form, space, and color, and as triggers for transcendental experiences and emotions. She works with paint on canvas, occasionally incorporating neon tubing, starfish, and shells into her compositions. As Weatherford describes, Modern movements and artists inspire her metaphysical approach to nature: “The American symbolist movement is deeply rooted in landscape, which is very important to me. I’m interested in Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Charles Burchfield, Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe. In all this work there is a compelling centrifugal force distinctive to images that point to the transcendental.”