Draft:Mary O'Hare

Mary O'Hare (1923–2019) was an artist from Port Huron, Michigan. Though she also worked in sculpture, O’Hare is known primarily for her paintings, most of which were portraits and landscapes. She was inspired by Paul Cézanne and by members of the Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she was a student beginning in 1939.

Biography
Mary O'Hare was born in December 1923 in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada to Mary Elizabeth O’Hare (née McDonald) (1903 – 1987) and Peter Ethelbert O'Hare (1898 - 1972). She immigrated with her family to Port Huron, Michigan, USA at one year six months of age. As a child, O'Hare was interested in both the visual and performing arts. Though she eventually became known as a painter, O’Hare also studied music in 1936 on a scholarship to the Port Huron extention of Sherwood Music School.

O’Hare was admitted to the Cranbrook Academy in 1939. There, her work with sculptor Marshall Fredricks led to commissions for church and school projects, some of which were paintings. This was the advent of her career as a painter. While continuing to paint, she widened her intellectual purview to include psychology and philosophy, which she studied at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. Ultimately O’Hare completed her artistic studies at the Cape Cod School of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Art, which ultimately granted her a Bachelor of Arts degree. During the final year of her studies her studies, O'Hare created a Studio Arts department at the Port Huron Junior College (now St. Clair County Community College), c.a. 1954.

Career
Mary O’Hare painted and sculpted full-time, on commission. Much of her income was from portraiture. In the 1960s O’Hare’s earlier church commissions led to her involvement with the Vatican, for which she created images of Saint Martin de Porres, a modern Black saint, and Blessed Clara of Pisa, a fifteenth century nun. O'Hare produced a prodigious quantity of landscapes in the 1960s. Much influenced by Paul Cézanne, her landscapes are abstracted into intersecting planes of tonal light and color. The majority of her landscapes depict Tuscany, the marble quarries at Carrara, and Provence in France. In the mid-sixties she returned to the United States worked in Boston for a brief period. There she took on a high-profile commission, painting Cardinal Richard Cushing.

Though O’Hare continued to work in portraiture, her interest in landscapes led to travel to Colorado Springs, Colorado where she repeatedly painted the rock formations in The Garden of the Gods in 1986.

Works

 * Portrait of Cardinal Cushing of Boston
 * Saint Martin de Porres
 * Blessed Clara of Pisa
 * Self-Portrait
 * Iran Hostage Still-life
 * View from Studio Near Pisa, Italy
 * View of Amphitheater at Arles
 * Floral Still-life
 * The Seven Sisters: Garden of the Gods