Funday at the Zoo
4" x 14"
M E R R Y K O H N
Funday at the Zoo
4" x 14"
A Day on the
Farm
A Bit of San Francisco XVI
Insouciant Porposal
12" x 9"
5" x 7"
12" x 6"
Puppy Parade
3" x 15"
Beach Babies II
4" x 16"
Ballet Babies II
3" x 12'
A Bit of
Halloween III
What's So Funny? Sunset
Sorrow
4"
x 6"
24" x 12"
8" x 10"
A Bit of San Francisco XII
As the Snow flies
What's Your Secret?
7" x 5"
8" x "-Oval
16" x 12"
War
of the Whirls
Mamma's Time Out War
of the Whirls-Inset
24" x
36"
24" x 12"
No
School Today Bullseye
Paris Rooftops III
24" x 20"
24" x 36"
6" x 4"
Garden Magic II Boys
and Girls Together
Garden Magic III
6" x 4" 24" x
12"
6" x 4"
"Merry Kohn was born on December 26, 1951 in Fort Meade, Maryland.
Being the daughter of a military officer, and the proverbial "army
brat," Merry traveled the world over with her family. Her many
experiences abroad stirred her creative side and she began painting at an
early age. Merry now makes her home on the beautiful Monterey Peninsula, yet
you can see the influences of her travels through Europe, the Orient and
the United States evident in her work.
Having painted all her life, Merry is basically a self- taught artist and
paints with a whimsical, yet uncompromising wit. The titles of her paintings
usually indicate a joke or a story that has to be searched for in the canvas.
Collected internationally, Merry's work has been shown across the United
States, in Japan and Korea. Critics and audiences of naive art have
compared her to Michel Delacroix, Yamagata and Wysocki. Munsingwear
commissioned her in 1986 to do the cover of their centennial annual
report and, later that year, to do the poster for their Annual Munsingwear
Bicycle Race in Crested Butte, Colorado. She has been displayed in the
Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art with artists such as Grandma Moses, Henri
Rousseau, Ivan Rabuzin and Mattie Lou O'Kelley. Most recently, her work
was exhibited in a group show, at the Chicago Center For Self-Taught Art.
She has produced puzzles, calendars, mugs, greeting cards and other
items for many companies including Hallmark. In 1993, Merry's wonderful design
"Made in Paris," was selected at the European Workshop to be used by
UNICEF as a 1995 Christmas Advent Calendar. It was also selected as a
Christmas card. In 1998, they produced four of her images into cards.
In 1998, she was commissioned by the internationally renowned, Monterey Bay
Aquarium, to do three painting to be made into a gift line for
their stores. For 1999, and again in 2000, Hallmark produced an advent
calendar from one of her snow scenes.
The happiness of childhood is recaptured in every canvas. Not one person's
particular childhood, but an archetypal, idealized childhood in which we
collectively share. One critic once wrote, "The
feeling evoked are those of the pictures of old story books: a trace of deja
vu, of daydreaming on a golden afternoon as the shadows lengthen.""
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