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MARY
DRAKE COLES
Nothing
has ever stopped Mary Coles; not the polio that crippled her
right arm at the age of ten, nor the glaucoma that finally
took her sight in the 1950's. This artist grew up in New Jersey,
but spent her summer in Edgartown since she was six or seven.
When polio struck, a friend gave her some oil paints to cheer
her up and thus began her art career. Mary's first art teacher
was Vaclav Vytlacil who came to the Vineyard as a young man
to visit a friend of her mother's. Her work now appears along
with Vytlacil's in the permanent collection of the Old Sculpin
Gallery.
From
the 1940's, Mary painted and exhibited with the Vineyard Paint
Group which later became the Martha's Vineyard Art Association.
In the late 1940's and early 1950's, Mary spent time painting
in Haiti where an art renaissance was happening. She had five
shows, but her eyesight was almost gone. In 1956, she moved
from New York City to Edgartown.
Mary
continued to paint even after she lost her sight. "I
know what bittersweet looks like," she has said. "And
I know what a horse feels like. I know anatomy." She
remembered sunsets and the look of the sand and storm clouds
on the ocean. "I couldn't do it if I didn't already know
color well, and if I didn't understand the balancing of form."
Her
work is included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newark
Museum, Rutgers College, and Stetson University in Deland,
Florida where Fred Messersmith of the Old Sculpin Gallery
had urged her to exhibit in 1973. When asked how she knew
when a painting was done, she said her friends wouldn't lie
to her and would let her know when she needed to do more.
Through her years and her infirmaries, she continued to work.
Painting was her reason for being.
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