On the Cover:
“Egrets at Dawn”
By Mary Whyte
Story by Tina Schell
M
ary Whyte, artist, author and teacher, is a local, national and
international treasure. She and her husband, Smith Coleman,
who handcrafts her beautiful frames, relocated to Johns Island
from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she attended the Tyler
School of Art. Their move was prompted by Mary’s bout with cancer, which caused
her to seek a place that would “give us a deeper meaning to our lives—a place
where we could reinvent ourselves and start over.” Fortunately for all of us, Mary
found her place with our neighbors here on Seabrook Island.
Known primarily as a figure painter, Mary also paints plein air
landscapes in oil. She prefers watercolor “because of that ethereal
quality you can so readily get with the medium.” Her “Egrets at Dawn”
which graces our cover was the result of one of her daily walks along
the marsh, where she often “witnesses beauty so startling that I have to
race back to my studio to fetch my palette and brushes.”
Mary and her work have been featured on CBS Sunday Mornings.
Her paintings are included in numerous corporate, private and
university collections, as well as in the permanent collections of South
Carolina’s Greenville County Museum of Art and the Gibbes Museum
of Art in Charleston. She has been featured in International Artist,
Artist, American Artist, Watercolor and American Art Collector, L’Art
de Aquarelle and numerous other publications. She is the author of
Down Bohicket Road, Working South, Painting Portraits and Figures in
Watercolor, Alfreda’s World, An Artist’s Way of Seeing and Watercolor for the Serious
Beginner. Her work can be found at Coleman Fine Art in Charleston.
In her essay “A Scrap of Heaven” Mary describes a morning when