02/12/2024
Hello! I’m Maryanne Riggins Hewitt, “MRH”. I’m so glad to meet you!
I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida on the coasts of the Jacksonville beaches that include Atlantic Ocean views and the beauty of the intracoastal waterways and its marshes. Art and travel have always been part of my life. My mother loved to travel and experience new places and cultures, a passion she passed on to me. She also loved going to art festivals like the Jacksonville Beaches art festivals and the annual Shrimp Festival in Fernandina. I was surrounded by family artists growing up including my Aunt Lucie Mack, who did beautiful oil portraits and my husband’s grandparents, Will and Rebecca Hardy who were accomplished watercolorists. (My husband and I grew up together.)
Art and business combined with spurts of entrepreneurship are threaded throughout my life. A perspective drawing class sparked a career in commercial design work. My architectural marker renderings skill landed me a job at HOK - the largest architectural firm in the world at the time. I even had my own commercial interior design firm in Jacksonville, FL. When my children were babies I took a pause from the corporate world and painted at home, selling my artwork in local gift shops. I also did architectural marker renderings of people’s homes to bring in extra income. I even had a business painting customized ceramic platters sold at home party type settings. Eventually, raising my children and the demands of the corporate world consumed my attention.
In 2020, during the COVID pandemic shelter-in-place orders, my daughter encouraged me to pick up the paintbrush again - after a 15 year pause. I am once again “hooked”.
I mentioned a passion for travel. My family travels a lot. My husband and I now live in Dallas, TX area - right in the middle of the country with 2 major airports and multiple major highways that can get us anywhere we want to go in the world. We have a son here in Texas, most of our family is in Florida and a daughter in New York City. So we travel.
I’m enjoying capturing vignettes of our travels through photos and then painting them using my photos as a reference. For me it’s not enough to take the picture. I have to paint it and really know the scene intimately. It’s my way of bringing honor to that scene that brought me so much joy in the moment. The painting of it gives me the pleasure of creative expression and the challenge of overcoming a blank canvas.
Thinking back, this started a long time ago. My first landscape was of a mountainside in Hong Kong taken from the water. I took the photo when I was a summer exchange student in 1994 and painted it in my high school art class. It was an oil pastel and the principal of the school framed it and put it in his office, imprinting in me that my art could also bring joy to others.
My paintings hold my own “1000 words” - stories that bring me joy to remember. My hope is they remind you of your own stories too.
