Mariah Masilko

I paint lonely, abandoned things. Sometimes eerie, haunting things. My subjects are the rural – farmhouses, schoolhouses, prairie churches, barns, windmills, and military structures; and the institutional – nineteenth century insane asylums, hospitals, and sanatoriums. I also explore some not-so-abandoned historic buildings and their architectural details. Sometimes people (we can be lonely too). The fox that guides my visions. Using traditional media (watercolor, oil, colored pencil, graphite) and more recently, digital media, I give expression to a world of shadows just outside attention.

When people forget a place and move on, there is something they leave behind – it’s there in that paint that peels away revealing layers of other paint colors underneath; it’s in those cracks in the windows; it’s in the sink full of dishes left waiting to be washed and put away but never are; it’s in the patterns the light makes coming through the windows, touching the floor here or the wall over there; it’s in the way the grass outside moves in the wind like ocean waves; it’s in the lonesome tree whose leaves rustle as they tell what they’ve seen, if only we could understand their whispers.