About the Artist

Penny Marz enjoyed doing artwork throughout her childhood. The Wisconsin native did mostly pencil and colored pencil drawings of animals on her parents’ dairy farm. After taking art classes in high school and a drawing class at UW-Whitewater, she had planned on minoring in art. However, her educational priorities changed, and Penny graduated in 1981 from UW-Whitewater with a B.S. in Geography and began working on a Master’s degree in Geological Sciences from UW-Milwaukee. She married Richard Marz in 1984 and moved to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, finally completing her M.S. degree requirements in 1986. In 1988, Penny and her husband settled in Statesboro, Georgia and had three children. After her youngest child started school, Penny began taking community-offered art classes, and eventually joined the Statesboro Regional Art Association in 2003. Currently Penny serves as Editor of SRAA’s Artline newsletter. She enjoys painting and drawing pet and human portraits, wildlife, and scenes from nature. Her work is done in oils and acrylics, but she also works with pastels and various drawing media. Other examples of Penny’s work can be viewed at the West Main Street Gallery and Studio located in downtown Statesboro.

Penny has completed several pet portrait commissions for area residents, and has also exhibited in local and regional shows including the following:

2007 Wildlife Exhibition, Averitt Center for the Arts, Statesboro
2007 Fifth National Juried Exhibition of the Rome Art Coterie in Rome, Georgia
2006 Flora + Fauna = FUNA!!! Averitt Center for the Arts, Statesboro
2005-2007 SRAA Annual Exhibition, Averitt Center for the Arts, Statesboro
2005-2007 Artist of the Month, Statesboro Regional Library
2005 Celebrating the Arts of the Region, Averitt Center for the Arts, Statesboro
100 x 100 x 100 Show, Averitt Center for the Arts, Statesboro
2004-2007 Kiwanis Ogeechee Fair

Artist’s Statement

I enjoy the challenge of trying to capture the essence of what I see in 2-dimensional form. No matter whether the subject is animals, humans, still life or a scene in nature, my goal is to express the visual and emotional impact that subject has on me through depicting expressions, personality, or mood. I love color and am fascinated by the way light affects color, so I continually strive to work with colors in such a way that the resulting piece will come to life, not necessarily in picture perfect form, but with a life of its own.