About the Artist

Molly Magai’s paintings express her interest in vision, speed, and the beauty of the world, as well as its impending destruction at the hands of mankind. She is a native of Cleveland, Ohio and a Seattle resident since 1992. She is represented by studio e gallery in Seattle and her work has been displayed at many venues in the U.S. including Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle; Denise Bibro Fine Art and ABC No Rio in New York City; Ellsworth Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, Massachusetts; the Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, Vermont; and Collar Works in Troy, New York.  She received a BA in painting and drawing from Bennington College and attended the State University of New York’s Studio Program at Empire State College in New York City.

"Magai" rhymes with "why."

Download resume (pdf)

to purchase, and more information

Molly is represented by studio e gallery in Seattle. If you’re interested in a piece, please contact info@studioegallery.org.

See more art, and learn more about Molly, at studio e’s webpage, or on Facebook or Instagram.

Artist’s Statement

My paintings capture the landscape created by the continuous growth of industrial and transportation infrastructure. Through them I express my interests in both the act of perception and the struggle between human beings and the natural world - in particular, the slow Armageddon of climate change.

Structures like freeways, container stacks, and shipping cranes are made for human convenience. The industrial landscape, crisscrossed with roads, power lines, and train tracks, grows in an unplanned way. Its unpredictability is interesting. It can resemble the natural landscape in its many-layered complexity. And, of course, nature is still present. For example, the trees next to the highway were planted as a windscreen, and to hide the industrial view, but they are still just trees, ancient life forms of astounding complexity. They survive here, and may seem to bless or threaten our enterprises. 

Painting both its natural and man-made elements, I work to make this landscape visible in both its destructiveness and its beauty.

I paint the landscape in motion, as we usually see it, from our cars. I work from photographs that I take from a moving vehicle. The image is filtered through the windshield, and then through a camera, before I paint it. Using a 500-year-old medium, oil painting, I faithfully reproduce halos and blurs that result from the camera’s inability to cope with motion and low light. In this way I contrast the natural process of eyesight, and the old process of painting, with newer, technological processes, just as nature and technology are contrasted in the landscape itself.