Hopper meets Hitchcock at KickstART in Farmington

Art can be healing. Mary Lou Stropoli knows this.

The Brother Rice High School art teacher says she shifted the focus of her anxiety to her own creativity. Channeling her thoughts and worries into serene watercolors, Stropoli adds a twist by incorporating images of “impending doom” to reflect current events.

“I’ve always played with the idea of juxtaposition in my work,” says the Farmington resident. “This quarantine, however, helped me to fully embrace both the light and dark of a situation. The environment in which I was working with filled with anxiety as our society felt with COVID. I flourished and came alive in my own creativity.”

Her works feature favorite places she’s visited in the past, such as a landscape of a Grand Haven beach where she took her kids in the summer of 2019. She paints based on photographs she’s taken, and adds the element of danger or attack.

“The objective for each piece is to appear beautiful and unexpected,” Stropoli says.

In addition to sharing her art through her brand, That Art Girl, Stropoli’s works are being showcased at KickstART gallery in Farmington for her exhibit, “Gifts of Quarantine.” The show goes through Dec. 23, with social-distanced viewing times available.

KickstART Farmington is a nonprofit arts organization that aims to strengthen the community through the arts.

Dwayne Hayes, KickstART’s executive director, says Stropoli proposed the exhibit and that curator Molly McNeece thought the timing of the show was great since Stropoli recently completed a mural at Sunflour Bakehaus, next door to the gallery.

He says her works reflect her perspective on life amid the pandemic and are worth checking out. KickstART gallery, which opened a year ago, had to undergo some rearranging amid the pandemic. Artworks are featured in the larger gallery room to allow more distance between visitors, and shop items have been moved to the back.

“People will enjoy seeing Mary Lou’s paintings in person with their beautiful use of color and surreal images of flying jellyfish over farms and large seagulls menacing a lighthouse — like Edward Hopper meets Alfred Hitchcock,” Hayes says.

For Stropoli, who was born in New Jersey but raised in Farmington Hills, being home more gave her a chance to do something she’d always wanted to — spend more time on her artwork — and she relished the opportunity.

“I focused on the gift of time,” Stropoli says. “It was something I wanted for a long time and once it was available to me, I decided to make the most of it. I knew I had something inside of me that needed to come out. I knew that I had to make the most of it.”