Born in Quincy, Mass., Mary Curran Bitner, was raised and educated in Westchester County, New York. After graduating from The Ursuline School and The College of New Rochelle, she married her U.S. Military Academy Cadet fiance’ new Lt. Richard Bitner and began her career as an Air Force pilot’s wife and elementary school teacher. Much of her time was spent raising her two children and teaching school until she retired several years ago.
Although she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature, she always had a very strong attraction to creative pursuits. Since childhood, she possessed a strong desire to create beautiful things. Painting on her own, as a self-taught artist for many years, she gained some recognition. Her work has been shown and sold in galleries here in the Tampa Bay Area, as well as Key West. Her 3D Coral Reefs are hanging in homes nationally, and internationally, as far away as the Red Sea in Kuwait. With retirement from the classroom, and more free time, she went back to college and studied Drawing, Painting, and Design at HCC -Ybor and USF.
Mary Curran’s work is influenced by her favorite artists, DaVinci, Cezanne, Chagall, O’Keeffe, Kahlo, Joan Mitchell and Jay DeFeo. With her many years dancing the ballet, she has become very conscious of line, form, color, music, and drama which she expresses in her paintings.
Being comfortable painting different genres in a variety of media, she has received recognition for her large abstract florals. Flowers are a favorite genre for her because she grew up surrounded by flowers in gardens grown by her mother, Florence Curran, a master gardener. The artist dedicates her flowers to the loving memory of her mother, whose name happens to mean flower.
Mary Curran Bitner has become increasingly conscious of painting as a woman with a very feminine spirit, as opposed to the traditional point of view . Early in her body of work she painted how it feels to be a woman. Now she paints with the pure joy of being a woman!
