University of Guelph-Humber business students curated an art exhibition featuring Canadian artist, Mary Morganelli, at the Guelph-Humber Art Gallery from March 10 to 20.
The art exhibition, “Windows to the World: The Journey of Imagination and Travel” showcased Morganelli’s vibrant paintings with the theme of travel.
At the age of six, Morganelli left Ceprano, a small town in Italy, and moved to Toronto with her family to seek a better life.
She said she discovered her love for art at a very young age, but her painting journey began when she took an art course in high school.
However Morganelli married her high school sweetheart after graduation and put painting aside to raise her family as a young mother.
“I got married the year after [graduation] so I had to hang up my painting for a while because the family came along,” she said. “I had a little bit of hard life.”
Morganelli said her young family struggled financially, and she also lost her three-year-old son to disease.
“By the time my son passed away, we were almost in personal bankruptcy,” she said.
Morganelli worked in accounting while her husband worked two to three jobs to raise their family as young parents.
For 39 years, she had not painted at all.
Morganelli finally decided it was time to paint again in 2010 and took art courses to refresh her skills.
“And it took off from there,” she said.
The art exhibition, “Windows to the World: The Journey of Imagination and Travel” showcased her paintings inspired by the theme of travel and photos she took during her trips across the continents.
“My camera’s constantly clicking away,” Morganelli said. “I just look at something, and it gives me ideas and it tells me that would be a perfect next painting.”
She paints the images with new interpretations and seeks to bring an emotional experience to viewers.
One of Morganelli’s paintings, Daily Bread, was inspired by a photo she took of a man carving wood in a straw market in the Bahamas.
She said in the original photo, there were clusters of straw hats and baskets behind the man, which was not good for the painting version of it.
Morganelli instilled her imagination of the scene on a canvas and resituated the man outside of his house in her painting.
“I just imagine what his house would look like, resituated him to his house and say he’s working for his money, his meals,” she said. “So I called it, Daily Bread.”
Morganelli seeks beauty in the scenes she sees and expresses it through her paintings.
“I don’t look at the bad things,” she said. “I look and see what beauty I can make out of it.”