Marie Porterfield is an artist and educator whose paintings explore the strange, bizarre, and beautiful undulations of life, longing, and human experience. Her works are informed by the various landscapes in which she has lived, the stories and forms from the art history that she teaches, and the characters and creatures from her own life. Although her paintings are often compared to fantasy and surrealism, she considers them more akin to poetry in their symbolic exploration of mood, memory, emotion, introspection, and imagination.
Marie earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from East Tennessee State University in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in Art from the University of Georgia in 2011. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant in Creative and Performing Arts to Turkey where she studied Ottoman tile painting and was featured in the Oxford American’s “100 Under 100: The New Superstars of Southern Art”. Born to the Appalachian Mountains, the wilderness taught her to see. After living on three continents, Marie returned home to Appalachia. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Art at Virginia Highlands Community College in Abingdon, Virginia where she also serves as the Department Chair of the Liberal Arts and Arts Array Director.
