Mary Painter is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, where she earned her BA in Studio Art and Urban Studies (Environmental Design). She draws substantial inspiration from spaces she has lived in — from the metropolis of Seoul, South Korea, the American, Southern Californian suburbia where she was raised, the countryside of Kumamoto, and her current residence in Osaka, Japan.

A hybrid in many ways — from mixed ethnicity to expression through different media — her gallery work lies at the collision between the digital and traditional painting mediums and the physical-psychological landscape. She holds a fascination for how cities, urban spaces, and architecture interplay with human identity. Her goal is to investigate what it means to live within an urban and imagined realm, and how these tangible and intangible forces have the potential to stabilize — or destabilize — each other.

For her editorial work, she aims for elegance juxtaposed with compositions and color accents to evoke strong emotions within the reader.

For her illustrations, she loves to celebrate the dark and light within people and the life of architectural buildings.

When she is not creating with her hands, she is studying languages, jamming to songs at karaoke, and live-streaming her gameplay of JRPGs.

[And yes, her last name is legitimately “Painter.”]