Mary D. Ott

After a 20-year career in educational research, I became a visual artist in the early 1990s. My art education included courses in painting, drawing, and printmaking at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, private acrylic painting classes with Anne Marchand of Washington, DC, printmaking workshops at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring, MD, and additional printmaking classes at Montgomery College in Silver Spring.

I have been a member of Touchstone Gallery in Washington, DC since 2001. My print media includes intaglio, photogravure, paper lithography, monotype, and others. In addition to landscapes, much of my imagery is derived from nature.

My recent artwork includes two related bodies of work—paintings and etchings with images of blades of grass. For the paintings I applied acrylic paint to canvas using a piece of embroidery yarn as a “brush.” For the etchings, I used a piece of thread to apply acid-resistant liquid to a zinc plate and then etched the plate. I printed the resulting plate in a number of different ways. Some of the paintings and etchings look like fields of grass and others are nonrepresentational.