Artist's Bio:

I was born Shawn Maris Lockhart in Poughkeepsie, New York at Vassar Brothers Hospital and lived an idyllic childhood in the mid-Hudson Valley, Catskill Mountain region, Rip Van Winkle Country.

As a child I imagined the rolling Catskills were sleeping giants (or grass and stone-covered dinosaurs!). I was born a dreamer and a seeker and grew into a fledgling incurable romantic. (Thank God, there's no cure!) The artist within emerged early on. A favorite memory is when I won a television at a church bazaar. I was only six or seven. My dad asked me if I could trade it for anything what would it be. I promptly responded a box of paints. He bought me my first metal tray of watercolors...and there you have it. The love affair began.

Life has tossed me around a bit...from New York to Florida to Maryland to over a year in the beloved northwest corner of County Clare, Ireland...ah, don't get me going on about West Clare... and, as fate would apparently have it, back to Maryland again.

I went from praying for visions, a devout Catholic girl who wanted to become a nun (maybe I should've), to a practicing Buddhist (nam myoho renge kyo), to born again and back again, to having vision vignettes myself. No more boxes. The Great Mystery moves on.

But back to the art...art is life, life is art...constant and constantly evolving. Mara (see the Mara story) is the embodiment of varied art forms that have been manifesting over the years. This website is a product of that evolution. Here you will find a sampling of what is currently emerging from the deep well and some vintage pieces as well. Hopefully, the work will tell you its own story, as well as mine, known and unknown, past, present, and yet to come. It is rather intimidating sharing these bits of my soul with such an overwhelming audience, but here it goes.

I welcome your comments at: shawnmlockhart@yahoo.com

The Mara Story:

Lots of people ask me where this name came from. So here's the short tale of it . . .

A long, long time ago back in the nineteen seventies I had a dream about a young girl with dark curly hair.
She was walking down a curving oak staircase dragging a large white button down the wall as she came.
When she got to the bottom of the stairs she held up the button, looked straight at me and said, quite matter-of-factly,
ÒMy name is Mara, and this is the moon.Ó

Ok.

I thought that this child would sometime make herself known in the physical world.

I have two sons.

When I was going through the heart-rending dissolution of my marriage, twenty years later, the dream came back to me.

I realized this child is none other than myself and amidst all the changes, however difficult, I could be sure about one constant in my life...art.

So I became Mara and she my art's namesake.

I know my middle name, Maris, means the sea in Latin.
What I didn't find out until I walked the west of County Clare, Ireland for the first time in 1995
and bought an Irish-English dictionary, is that Mara is an Irish word for the sea.

No coincidences.

It just became more meaningful to me.

So forget the Hebrew mara . . . bitter, and the Buddhist maras . . .they can be tricky, and the Hispanic mara gangs . . .

Just think of the sea, the ebb and the flow, waves emerge and recede, ever-changing, yet constant

ah,

tonn na mhara, wave of the sea,

that's me.

Artist's Studio - Open by Appointment

410-775-7566

ShawnMLockhart@yahoo.com