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Mary Louise Coulouris
Mary Louise Coulouris "Maybe art should be the place where people can slow down, indulge their senses with a static image that can take being looked at for more than 12 seconds."

My radio is an object, but it is also much more than that. It is animate and inanimate. It produces all sorts of people, attitudes, noises, sounds, accents, windows on the world, to be intrigued by, irritated with, amused by and to learn from.

I listen to it a lot while I'm painting, inevitably, I tune to Radio 4, as I like the intellectual stimulus. We are all deluged with information often from two or three courses at the same time in the present day. We have learned to cope with being in at least two place/time situations.

Perhaps this is why I am able to grapple with Desert Island Discs while involved in the excitement of mixing just the right shade of blue.

Different aspects of Radio 4 vary in compatibility with doing creative art work. Music and manual work activate different parts of the brain, so music can be particularly satisfying, while speech can sometimes compete with your thoughts.

Socrates said, in Plato's Republic, "more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it."

Sometimes music can "go with the flow" of your work and underpin the strongest feeling of creativity and oneness with the human race. One really eerie think I have noticed is, if I have been working on some detail of my work, while listening to a particular bit of radio, the next day, when I take up work on it again, the same programme, a play or story, comes flooding back into my head!
Mary Louise is a printmaker, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Printmakers, painter, and public artist. Imagination, creativity, and design sense are central to her work. This allows her to branch into many areas. She recently completed a large mosaic in Greece, for example, and has been chosen in an open national competition to design and produce a tapestry for the reception area of Yale College, Wrexham and she is currently working on a commission for the House of Lords.

Some of Mary's work is conceptual in the true sense as in Mozambique, where she extends the real event of people living in trees during the floods to make a comment on the basic human need to survive. Her motivation has consistently been social, with a recent developing passion for landscape. Her continuing figurative work has now turned to the field of sport and aerobics, where she finds room for the expression of her quirky individual view of this human endeavour. She was born in New York, trained at the Slade School, London, and now lives in Scotland.
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3-27 November 2005
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