Mary Royall Wilgis is a light painter based in Brooklyn. Her work is a meditation on the texture of time and the thing-ness of light. She begins her practice by “light foraging:” taking swaths of raw canvas out into the street to find compositions of light filtering through trees, in between leaves, and around buildings. With Flashe ink, she paints the imprint of the light, emulating a photographic process, to capture a specific moment in time that can never be repeated. To honor the moment in time, she titles her paintings with the time or location where the light was “foraged”. After bringing these pieces back to the studio, she explores the personality of the light through thin layers of oil paint and hand-cut translucent mesh. Although her work is primarily oil painting on canvas, the overlaid layers of fabric give it a distinct sculptural quality that makes the work respond to its environment by interacting with the present light sources, creating light and shadow within the world of the painting itself. This process explores how light can shape space, measure time, and define color. In her work, she references the light and space movement and writing such as Plato’s “Allegory of The Cave.” Her work asks questions such as: Is the light a representation of the object or simply the object itself?

Mary Royall Wilgis is a light painter based in Brooklyn. Her work is a meditation on the texture of time and the thing-ness of light. She begins her practice by “light foraging:” taking swaths of raw canvas out into the street to find compositions of light filtering through trees, in between leaves, and around buildings. With Flashe ink, she paints the imprint of the light, emulating a photographic process, to capture a specific moment in time that can never be repeated. To honor the moment in time, she titles her paintings with the time or location where the light was “foraged”. After bringing these pieces back to the studio, she explores the personality of the light through thin layers of oil paint and hand-cut translucent mesh. Although her work is primarily oil painting on canvas, the overlaid layers of fabric give it a distinct sculptural quality that makes the work respond to its environment by interacting with the present light sources, creating light and shadow within the world of the painting itself. This process explores how light can shape space, measure time, and define color. In her work, she references the light and space movement and writing such as Plato’s “Allegory of The Cave.” Her work asks questions such as: Is the light a representation of the object or simply the object itself?