Sponsor: Independent

Mary Kay Colling is a third generation Irondequoit resident. Her grandparents built the house at 44 Hurstbourne Rd., and moved in shortly before (or shortly after) their first child, her mother, was born in 1924. Mary Kay used her favorite period photos of that house and its stylish residents as references for the painting in her "Window on Irondequoit." She will include with her window archival digital enlargements of the photos she used to document the painting. Set in the mid '20's, its title is "Roaring Irondequoit."

Mary Kay is a professional fine artist and art publisher, still living in Irondequoit. After being located for ten years in Village Gate Square, her gallery and studio where she shoes natural media and digital fine art have moved to 222 Turk Hill Park in Fairport. Its website is mkcolling.com. Her small gallery, where she shows natural media and digital fine art, is a landmark for navigating Village Gate Square. It has been in the same place for ten years. Its website, mkcolling.com, has been online for nearly that long. Samples of her now three-year-old Evedom® Publishing & Licensing division's consumer products are on another website, evedom.com. She works in her home studio "twenty-four hours a day." Her husband Al, a Kodak retiree, manages the gallery and the artist.
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Artist Statement
My grandmother was eligible to vote the first time an election was open to women voters. I don't know whether she exercised her right, or not; but I do know that Women's Suffrage was very important to my mother. My mother took my sister and me to the Susan B. Anthony House several times when we were little, and explained what the lady who once lived there had done for us. Before it was transformed, it was just a quiet little house with old furniture in it and a gray haired lady sitting guard.

I absorbed the facts. I remember playing "Suffragette" a few times, marching around wearing a plaid scarf as a sash, shouting "I'm a sufferjet;" and that was that. It took a while to understand that my grandmother was profoundly aware of the historical significance of her time, and of the importance of teaching her daughters the new version of the feminine myth. She influenced my mother, who was born in 1924, and my mother influenced us.

My mother was a nosy little girl who never forgot a morsel of what she learned from eavesdropping on the adults. Because of her powerful memory and a great photo album to illustrate her stories, I have a strong affinity for the '20's. era. I think its surface - the cars, fashion, interior design - was beautiful, as is the affluence that made full participation in the world's political and financial arenas attractive to the rank-and-file middle-class sector of newly emancipated American women. Without their automobiles and new wealth, middle American women like my grandmother wouldn't have been able to discard their Victorian constraints so quickly.

Irondequoit was part of the revolution. My grandparents were early participants in the migration from city to suburbs when they built their house in Irondequoit - not just any house, a 1920's center entrance colonial, the '20's equivalent of the post-war ranch house. My grandmother showed her knees, bobbed her hair, dressed herself and her little girls in up-to-the-minute fashion and ideas, roared around in her own automobile, and chose Irondequoit for her residence.

My Window on Irondequoit symbolizes the revolution as it shaped the town's development with the house, a car and liberated women abstracted from my family photographs of them. It wasn't just Daisy Buchanan and Isodora Duncan who suddenly had more freedom than American women had known before--by the '20's, it was everywoman.

Please use your imagination to insert the roaring and zooming - they stood still for the camera.

- Mary Kay Colling, October 13, 2002
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Final Thoughts on Roaring Irondequoit
Normally I draw on the computer and print the drawings onto fibrous oriental paper to paint them coloring book style. They're beautiful paintings, but they require framing with glazing. I decided a change to canvas was the weight-wise thing to do. Standing up at an easel to draw and paint on canvas is significantly different than leaning over a table to paint on paper. Bifocals instead of reading glasses, a bouncy brush, drips . . . it was all new and annoying. Whoever acquires this painting should know that I suffered for this art! I'm pleased that the "snapshot" matches all my other paintings.

I love the subject matter: my grandmother, mother and aunt, who didn't really look like that, against the car and house that really did look just like that. The body model for the adult figure is somebody we don't like. That's the reason for the expression on my grandmother's face. It was a necessity - we don't have a picture of my grandmother standing and I love that dress with the stole.

The dramatic little girl in the rumble seat is my mother. Her little sister is preparing to throw the stuffed dog. The dog belonged to my mother. The little girls actually had darling poker straight bobs; but I'm the artist, and my favorite hair is thick, red and curly. The title refers to the Roaring Twenties and to my mother's expression for hearty laughing.

I believe the house was yellow and the awnings were green and white striped. The best of the Jordan Roadster photos show it in its yellow phase, so that's the reference I used. When I enlarged the photo, I noticed that there are irises in bloom at its bottom left corner and the license plate is for 1929. (In the old days, license plates were issued yearly.) In essence, this is what the people across the street on Hurstbourne Rd. could have seen when they looked out their windows.

My mother's birthday was November 1.