Mary Henry

Mary Henry, "Both Sides Now", 1989, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches. Like most of Henry's work, the style is geometric abstraction; it is one of several works whose titles are popular culture references, in this case to a Joni Mitchell song. Mary Henry (March 19, 1913 – May 20, 2009 ), born Mary M. Dill, was an American artist whose work, most notably large oil paintings and acrylics but also prints, was characteristized by geometric abstraction. Many of her pieces are diptychs and some are triptychs. Some of her work resembles, variously, op art, constructivism, or even psychedelic art.

Life Born in Sonoma, California, Mary Henry studied 1933–34 at the California College of the Arts (then called the California School of Arts and Crafts) in Oakland, California, where her teachers included modernists Ethel Abeel, Glen Wessels, and Marie Togni. She won a prize in a printmaking contest sponsored by Iowa State University (Ames, Iowa), and was invited there to teach applied art in their home economics department. Her "childhood sweetheart" Wilbur Henry "reluctantly" agreed to marry her and accompany her to Iowa, where he completed a master's degree in entomology while she taught.

During World War II, back in California while her husband served in the military, Henry studied lithography at San Francisco School of Fine Arts and worked drafting engineering drawings at Hewlett-Packard; this drafting experience would later allow her to draw uncommonly straight lines freehand in executing her paintings.

In 1976, Henry traveled to Alaska before settling in Washington, where she has lived since 1981 on Whidbey Island. Also in 1976, at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington, she attended a master painter's class with Jack Tworkov, then in his seventies. Tworkov remarked the affinity between their work; according to Kangas, the "linear precision and complexity" of Tworkov's late work owes a great deal to Henry; he, in turn, greatly encouraged her in her work.

Henry still made art until about 2003, but she ceased painting in her early 90s when she could no longer stretch her own canvases. Flintridge Award for Visual Artists (2001)