Seeing is both physical and metaphorical.

For Mary, learning to see took decades.

For any artist, seeing the natural world is more intense and refined than ordinary vision used in the everyday environment. Years of training might be required for an artist to develop the hand-eye coordination needed for drawing the human figure with both accuracy and artistic rendering.

Metaphorically, seeing can be a euphemism for cognitive or psychological ideas, such as learning something new; waking up to an obvious problem; or recognizing damaging, unproductive patterns of behavior. Years of experience and introspection might be required to move beyond a childhood fantasy, to learn how to use acquired skills in a more realistic, productive fashion.

Both processes took Mary years to complete. By 2020, at age 72, she recently confronted boxes filled with nearly a thousand 40- to 50-year-old fading, acid-damaged sketches, drawings, or finished works, ready to whittle her college-era works down to a manageable bundle of best pieces. This catalog of those figure drawings spans thirteen years from 1967 to 1979, with brief descriptive segments to illustrate the training/academic process. Biographical context provides insight into the timeline of desire, completion, separation, and self-realization, as she learned to see.