Mallory Agerton | All About the Journey

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

“An artist” was the only thing Mallory Agerton ever wanted to be, and an artist is exactly what she became. As a landscape painter today, she delights in the joy of the entire artistic process—the sensory experiences, the sweet memories conjured by specific places, and the journey she takes on every piece she creates.

Agerton grew up surrounded by art and culture. Her mother taught creative writing. Her father, a doctor for the Houston Grand Opera, painted in his free time. His crowning masterpiece was a 6-by-6-foot copy of a Tiepolo painting that was mounted on the ceiling of the family dining room. Her maternal grandmother was a close friend of Georgia O’Keeffe and regaled young Mallory with many stories about the iconic painter.

Perhaps Agerton’s most direct introduction to art came from an aunt on her mother’s side who was a professional painter. As a child, young Mallory loved to visit her aunt’s studio and responded viscerally to the experience. The sight of paint tubes and saturated canvases, the heady scent of oil paint, and the sound of tools in use all worked together to inspire her creativity. “I thought, ‘I want that. I want to do that,’” says Agerton.

Her focus on that goal never wavered. She attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, then spent two years at a boarding school in Switzerland, which allowed her to travel around Europe and experience its rich history of art and architecture. She earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art from the University of Texas at Austin, and later spent two years studying at the Art Students League of New York.

Following her stint in New York, Agerton returned to Houston, where she settled into her painting career while also raising a family. She started out painting portraits, and it didn’t take long before she was in high demand. She stayed in that arena for many years and built a successful business around her talent for painting people.

But as time passed, Agerton began to long for something more from her art. Although she loved portraiture, she nevertheless considered what it would be like to be her own creative director. She wanted to be inspired by places and things she encountered spontaneously. And there was something more: “I felt like, if I wanted to improve and grow as an artist, I needed to work from life,” she says.

Around the time she turned 50, Agerton made the momentous decision to leave the world of portrait painting and seek out something new. She quickly realized nature was to be her muse, and she returned to the landscape for inspiration—to the kinds of places that held her most cherished childhood memories and gave her solace. Painting new subject matter proved more challenging than she had anticipated, but she remained persistent. She took workshops with noted painters like Brian Blood, Matt Smith, Skip Whitcomb, and Michael Workman, and she graduated from Texas artist Deborah Paris’ Landscape Atelier program.

“Between my own efforts and the workshops, I started trying to reinvent my artistic identity,” she explains. And she succeeded—today Agerton’s artwork hangs in four galleries. She has won numerous awards, and she recently achieved signature status in the National Oil & Acrylic Painters’ Society. She maintains an active presence on Instagram to share her newest creations with the public.

Agerton has been drawn to outdoor spaces her whole life and feels a deep kinship with the scenes she paints. “I have always felt a deep connection to the landscape as a subject,” she says. She spent many childhood hours at a relative’s farm exploring its wondrous, unspoiled spaces, and those memories inform her compositions: “As a child I rode horses over the very types of hills that I paint. I waded in creeks like the ones I paint. I picked the wildflowers in the fields that are in some of my paintings. I felt a deep sense of peace and felt very connected to nature in that setting.”

Agerton finds artistic inspiration everywhere, from wide-open spaces in the Texas Hill Country to city parks in her hometown of Houston. Wherever she visits, she’s keenly aware of both the big picture and the details. Anything from a moody moonlit vignette to the gnarled bark on a tree might pique her interest. “It’s all around us,” she says of nature’s overt and subtle charm. “It’s wonderful.”

Three principal themes emerge in Agerton’s landscapes: a sense of narrative, the passage of time, and the “magic hours.” She is a voracious reader, and while she’s painting a site, she imagines stories about the history of the place or the people who lived there. What was their relationship with the land? What struggles did they endure? “I love the implied stories in the landscape,” she says.

Meanwhile, the ever-changing yet consistent aspects of the landscape inform Agerton’s work from an external, physical perspective. “I’m fascinated by how time changed the landscape, and yet the landscape is somewhat eternal,” she says of the eroding hillsides, flowing streams, and decaying buildings that embody the passage of time. Past and present reside in Agerton’s landscapes alongside the suggestion of what’s to come as daylight wanes, seasons change, and the universe evolves.

Dawn and dusk, the “magic hours,” are the times of day when she most enjoys the atmosphere and quiet solitude of the landscape. “I love the enchantment of that time,” she says. “The world looks so different and interesting then.”

When painting, Agerton dives down past visual elements into a deeper level of sensory experiences. She strives to convey the peace that the landscape brings her, along with the memories she carries from childhood. “I would love to give viewers that feeling I had as a child of sleeping on the porch and hearing the river at night, and of freshly picked blackberries that were still warm from the afternoon sun for dessert that evening.”

Agerton has developed a precise approach to painting over the years, which provides her with structure while still giving her freedom to capitalize on whatever surprises might come about during the process. Like the old masters, she works almost exclusively from memory. “I prefer the traditional process of thumbnails, drawings done to scale, and color studies as a starting point for paintings,” she says.

The process begins when something in the landscape catches her attention—a beam of light, intriguing lines, an interesting tree. Agerton makes several thumbnail sketches as well as a more detailed drawing on-site. She also keeps a journal, sketching with words about the details of the subject and how she’s feeling in the space. When she returns to her studio, she analyzes and edits her fieldwork before making a series of preliminary drawings and a color study in oil paint. All this begins to transform the subject from a straight representation of nature into a story told in the artist’s visual voice.

When Agerton has the painting’s structure laid out, she starts with an underpainting to map out warm and cool tones, then progresses to larger shapes, compositional elements, and the overall color story. She uses a mixture of transparent and opaque paints, often layering pigments to create nuance and dimension. Whatever Agerton puts down on canvas is a combination of nature’s pure forms and the memories and images they conjure in the artist’s eye. Her initial interactions with the landscape become a physical, emotional, and psychological springboard for every finished piece.

Visually, Agerton is particularly interested in the tension between colors, and the energy that tension creates throughout the picture plane. Some compositions pull the eye into their saturated core, while others expand outward from the canvas’ edge, stretching and breathing into the surrounding space.

Agerton is ever joyful about making art, and she approaches every painting from that standpoint. She has the same reaction to entering her studio now that she had visiting her aunt’s studio when she was a child—she’s enamored with the sights, sounds, smells, and textures. The actions of manipulating the paint, handling the tools, and infusing the canvas with memories are what drive her, from inception to fruition. She’s invested in the adventure of the process as much as, if not more than, the outcome. “For me, most of the joy comes in the day-to-day studio work,” she says. “Just the joy of getting in there and doing it. That’s what my greatest pleasure is—fooling around with the paint, making things work.”

Ultimately, Agerton wants to paint the elation she feels in nature, the peace it brings, and her gratitude for being able to share her experiences on her own sincere terms. She feels it’s important to highlight the positive things in our world, and likewise, in art. “I felt like there wasn’t enough peace and tranquility around, and thought, ‘I’ll try to work on that,’” she remarks.

“I’m a firm believer in people doing what they love,” says Agerton, and just as she was raised to pursue her passions, she encouraged her own children to do the same. Over time, she has found that following one’s dreams is about the journey, not the destination, and she has reveled in both the challenges and the victories that have come her way as an artist.

representationElla Walton Richardson Fine Art, Charleston, SC; Gallery 330, Fredericksburg, TX; Hawthorne Fine Art, New York, NY; Foltz Fine Art, Houston, TX; www.malloryagerton.com.

This story appeared in the April/May 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.

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