Artist's Statement
But, I could always draw.
I won 2nd place when I was six years old for a portrait of my Dad. It looks just like him. Abysmal handwriting in childhood kept me late to write "Marcy Rowen" 100 times on a blackboard. But I could draw.

I left home young and lived many places and had many jobs. Those early years were wild and rootless, but I was curious and searching. Painting grounded me and I created what came to be a portfolio, in pen and ink, from the Arthur Rackham playbook and that got me into art school.
At 27 I graduated from a small “commercial art” school in Seattle just as everything went digital. A job as a platemaker for a print house revealed that, while the mechanics of printing were interesting, I preferred to think of it as magic. That winter I moved to NYC and had two jobs:

1) a waitress at the Carnegie Deli and I’ve written a graphic novella about this cultural pocket of incredibly weird and wonderful NYC, (stay tuned for the novella).

2) a housepainter which morphed into a job creating trompe l'oeil- murals and specialty finishes.

Life, Art, and the Space In Between
A few years later, pregnancy took me out of the painting game (deadly fumes). In addition to losing my livelihood, my Mother was dying, my marriage ending, and I had to move out of my home. Change was brewing.
Between supporting a family and other life-stuff; art took a backseat for many years.
Around 2009- some friends and I dedicated each Sunday to paint, and we did this for nearly a year.

It was my first real effort to dedicate time. This hydrangea is in oil from Heidi’s yard – our host. Heidi Leighton has taught me so much about capturing the space in between.

Then I discovered pastels and worked on faces and did many portraits.

120 Days of Healing
In 2013 I took a nasty fall, crushed my dominant hand and ended up with a dreaded nerve condition famous for two reasons; 1) there is no cure and 2) it is a race to regain movement before scar tissue takes over. Big pain was triggered by the smallest movement.

I took time to repair, which I used therapeutically to beat back the encroaching scar tissue.

Each stage of recovery was documented with a painting(s) based upon the type of implement I could hold as healing progressed. This provided a way to measure improvement in a sensory framework, beyond the incremental clinical measures that Doctors love.

I curated 16 paintings from the 100+ I worked on in this period and I call this chapter: “120 Days of Healing". I started with a pen secured to a toilet paper roll since my hand could not curl around a brush. I love the face of this man.
Then moved on to fingerpaint
The last in the series was pencil and a
concerted effort to work in detail.
My Own Art Studio
I landed in Westerly, RI in 2016 and now, have studio space to work, and have sculpted a vine-filled acre into a secret garden. Hallelujah.

I have tried many mediums and a couple of years ago, spent two weeks in Florence to learn how to sculpt. I needed a 3D experience – the whole head! This gave me a chance to walk around and study relationship, light, and shadow. Portraits are daunting and inspiring.
I asked a portrait artist I admired how she began a new work.

“I start with the part I love the most.”

That was a revelation and it hit me that there are no rules.

Practicing art is outside of time

Perhaps it activates another side of the brain and one of the qualities is a break from the linear. Art is not comfortable or the line of least resistance. But I find it deeply rewarding and exciting. It is an exercise in letting go, in forgiveness, an effort to see deeply, a way to express - a spark in the dark., a way to love.