Mary Helmreich

         Mary Helmreich was born in 1945 in Newton, Massachusetts to Erdna & Howard Rogers, the inventor of the Polaroid color film process. From 1966 until the summer of 1981 Mary Helmreich and her family made their home in Boston, with a short sojourn to Vienna in 1968. For many years she concentrated on the human figure, drawing from life, first with a Boston group and then with the Winchester Studio Guild, assisted by professor emeritus King Coffin.After an exploratory cross-country trip in 1981, she and her family established residence in the community of Olivenhain in Encinitas, California. By then watercolor had become her favorite medium. She has been a member of many art organizations receiving awards and participating in group and solo shows. Now represented in several San Diego area Galleries, Mary paints cityscapes, landscapes, historical buildings and more intimate views of the area, including commissions, all carried out in the representational manner. 

          In the eleventh grade Mary Helmreich studied painting under Sidney Hurwitz at the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and at Cummington School of the Arts in the Berkshires. At Bard College New York from 1963-1964 she majored in Sculpture taught by Harvey Fite and Painting by Anton Refregier. She continued her studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from 1964-1965 under the tutelage of Robert Grady and Andreas Feininger.Toward the end of 1965 she traveled to London and Paris. While in Europe and later in Africa she experimented with an array of media: oil, watercolor, acrylic and clay.