Born and raised on a sheep and wheat farm in outback Australia in the 1960’s Mary Hanson’s affinity with the natural colours of that remote landscape have remained an inspiration at the heart of her paintings to this day. As a child, Mary was fascinated by the shine and glow of metal. She collected the shiny gold foil wrappers from chocolates and candies and kept them in a special box along with the ‘silver linings’ from abandoned cigarette packets. Early in her career, she worked as a decorative artist in film and interior design, often working with gold, silver and copper leaf. While gilding the ceiling of a hotel in Strasbourg, France, a chance request that she create some artwork for the walls, using the materials at hand, led to a well received series of landscape paintings that uncovered her unique talent and style all her own.

Mary has been a fine artist for over three decades, combining her passion for creating art with her second talent as an accomplished musician.

As a fine artist, Mary’s signature medium, metallic leaf gilding, is used to create one-of-a-kind dreamlike images, inspired by memories of childhood places with an ethereal quality that is hard to pinpoint, like the feeling of a half-remembered dream. Her landscapes are remote yet welcoming places of comfort and serenity - secret places with imaginary rivers, rocks and trees - with shimmering mirages and hidden messages along paths that beckon us to come linger and experience the beauty and stillness of the yet undiscovered. Each image is imbued with Mary’s unique sense of colour, and is created with gold, silver and copper leaf in a painstaking, multilayering process of oxidizing foils that takes many weeks to finish. Hers is a craft of the imagination with freedom to explore and create, an abandonment of the rules and a surrender to the process with what might happen along the way.