Mando Marie (seeyouthroughit)

"Crossing Paths", girls at a crossroad, hand-cut stencils and spray paint

2024

An American painter and Stencilist, Mando Marie (seeyouthroughit) has been living and painting in Colorado since 2001. She attended the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design (RMCAD) and has exhibited extensively in the US and Europe. She creates small works on paper and larger works on canvas for indoor exhibition. She also paints large scale murals in outdoor and urban and garden settings. Her use of nostalgic storybook like imagery is an invitation for viewing allegorical and highly painterly compositions . Signature in her very graphic work is the use of children and young adults as imagery tools to deliver clever often subtle messages that can straddle a line between comforting and spooky. Other signature and recognizable traits in her work are the common use of ‘twin imagery’ and the consistent use of vintage sewing patterns as backgrounds to inform the compositions of her paintings. The work has a very wide appeal. Her respect from the Street Art world, and her appeal to a fine Art crowd is a rare combination. Along with Swoon and AIKO, Mando Marie is among the very best women working in the important genre of Stencilism, and her visual language is as rich and graphically powerful as any of her peers. With Mando, it is refreshing to see graphic stencils (cutout devices to reproduce and apply graphic imagery or text) which are not the overtly violent or super sexual images that might have originally attracted audiences to the genre. As stencil painting matures Mando Marie’s work is keeping pace with an evolving and discerning eye. Thematically, a regular comparison from the fine art world is Henry Darger, but Mando Marie is also heavily influenced by classic ‘golden book’ era illustrators like Eloise Wilken, Tibor Gergely and Leonard Weisgard. Mando's paintings use a combination of mediums and techniques In most works, some elements are screen printed, some are wheat pasted, and some elements are drawn out and then made into hand cut stencils and spray painted. There is also acrylic paint applied by brush and splatter techniques, and of course the trademark use of vintage sewing patterns is present in most of her paintings. The complex use of multiple techniques in each piece lends to the depth and subtlety of her work.