THOUGHTS.

Darkness holds the promise of an unknown truth and light brings the assurance of a clear reality. Harmony lives within this complementarity - between the unseen and the seen, energy and matter, dark and light.

Compelled by universal polarities, my paintings convey the essence from deep within my own being as it is reflected in the cosmos, nature and humanity. Through compositional structures and luminous surfaces created with oil paint, brushes and other tools, the work elicits an experience that is at once intuitively familiar yet definitively unrecognizable.

My visual stories realize the harmonious reciprocity between our tangible existence and the intangible realm.

ROOTS.

The daughter of architects Ehrman B. and Hermine S. Mitchell, Marianne grew up in a home that her parents designed outside of Philadelphia, and where she and husband Bruce Schmit later raised their own family. The architecture of an open floor plan defined by glass facades and stone walls framing the Pennsylvania landscape, offered an environment of contrasts held in harmony that profoundly shaped Marianne's artistic vision.

 FACTS.

Marianne earned a BFA in painting from Washington University in Saint Louis, with post-graduate work in Japan, China, and at the Vermont Studio Center. A Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship recipient, Marianne has shown work nationally in New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Denver, and internationally in Scotland and Germany. Her work hangs in many important collections including The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Pew Charitable Trust, and Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Center. Marianne’s paintings are in private collections across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia.

A lifelong Philadelphian, Marianne and her husband lived in Denver CO from 2011 to 2019 when they returned to the Philadelphia area where they now reside in a historic Pennsylvania farmhouse.

Read Marianne’s Resume HERE.