Mary Dill Henry, a painter of great vision and integrity, a former student of constructivist master Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and an elected member of the American Abstract Artists Group (New York), passed away May 20, 2009 in Coupeville. She was 96 and lived in Freeland.

Mary Henry’s paintings are characterized by crisp, clean lines and an unemotional use of color, highlighting an extraordinary intellectual clarity. Working from small-scale sketches, Henry perfected her compositions and color choices before moving on to larger-scale canvases. Like Zen koans, Henry’s work explores depth and profundity through simplicity and balance.

“I believe the world is constructed on geometries. Everything is so beautifully put together. I’ve always wanted to create that feeling in my work, of getting down to the nitty-gritty and getting rid of all the things that aren’t important, to get to the essence of life. What do I hope to get from my work? Honesty, simplicity.

I wanted it to be uncomplicated and direct.”

— Mary Henry in an interview with Randy Gragg

Mary Henry’s artwork is in numerous collections including the Portland Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, the Institute of Design (Chicago), the Whatcom Museum, Microsoft, Safeco, Amgen and Hewlett-Packard.

She was the 2006 recipient of the Twining Humber Lifetime Achievement Award and 2001 Flintridge Foundation Award, and was a featured poster artist for the Seattle Corporate Council for the Arts. She was the focus of a major retrospective in 2007 at the Wright Exhibition Space in Seattle, curated by Matthew Kangas. Her work is represented by the Howard House Gallery in Seattle, Aaron Gallery in Chicago, and PDX Gallery in Portland, where her work is currently on exhibit (May 5-May 30). Her forthcoming exhibition at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, curated by Courtney Gilbert (Aug. 7-Oct. 2), will feature her large-scale paintings, as well as her delicate constructivist figure drawings from the WPA era.

Mary Henry was born in 1913 in Calistoga, Calif.

Her family lived a rural life; she remembered that her father, a farmer and mercury miner, routinely shot the rattlesnakes in their front yard evry morning.

During the Depression, Mary worked her way through a bachelor of fine arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, Calif. She worked for the Federal Art Project in Oakland as a muralist and easel painter, taught for three years at Iowa State, and in 1946 received a master of arts degree at the Institute of Design, Chicago, where she was a favorite student of Moholy-Nagy.

She and her husband, Wilbur Henry, lived with their two children, Suzanne and Bill, in Cambridge, Mass. and Helena, Ark., and settled in Los Altos Hills, Calif., on the family apricot ranch. Mary divorced Wilbur in the 1960s and moved to Mendocino, Calif., where she lived an independent life devoted to painting. She moved to Everett in the 1970s to be closer to Suzanne and her husband, John in Seattle, and in 1981, settled on seven acres in the middle of Whidbey Island, where she created an elaborate garden of rare plants surrounded by forest and meadows. She continued to live there, just as she wanted, until her death.

She is survived by her daughter, Suzanne Rahn, and her son-in-law John Rahn, of Seattle.

Visser Funeral Home is helping the family with arrangements.