Maria Floyd

Maria Floyd is a talented artist and illustrator, taking the inspiration for her artwork from the environment around her.

Maria Floyd has always painted. Working mainly with oils, occasionally acrylics or a mixture of both she paints on wooden board, producing expressive landscapes and seascapes which have become her forte. Using expressive mark making, she captures moments and movements of the sea and the sky, exploring vast, open, dramatic spaces. Working with a limited palette of colours – often dramatic and stormy, Maria prefers to sketch and paint outside, letting the elements influence her work. She then develops these ideas and paintings in her studio in the Duchy Centre in Princetown, where she says “I can get lost there and have to tear myself away”.

After studying Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmith’s College in London, Maria had her first exhibition in Oxford and has never looked back. . Her work can be currently found in the Beyond the Sea gallery in Padstow and she is also one of the artists showing in the Grain gallery in Sherborne which specialises in creative pieces made using wood. She has been shortlisted twice for the David Shepherd Foundation Wildlife Artist of the Year in the seascape category, with her paintings shown in the Mall galleries, and is a featured artist on the DSWF website raising funds and awareness for conservation.

In 2003 Maria took a short course in children’s book illustration which sparked an interest. She met with author Clare Luther and together they came up with the idea for a book written in rhyme suitable for young children with a nod toward Aesop’s fables. After a meeting with their publisher at MPress they were encouraged to write a series of 12 books each one focusing on African animals with a gentle, humorous morality tale at their centre. “The Safari Series” which is available in Tavistock Bookstop, has become hugely popular in primary schools and is now being used across the UK, especially in PSHE lessons as an aid to teaching themes such as kindness, boastfulness, and perseverance. The ink and watercolour illustrations highlight Maria’s talent as an artist as they are disarmingly simple and a world away from her emotional, brooding oil paintings.

Having moved to Tavistock in 2016, she is only now beginning a series of moorland landscapes which promise to be just as sweeping and intense as her earlier beautiful work. She says she is inspired by the wonder of nature “My paintings are a direct response to a landscape or seascape, a situation, a moment captured – connecting the elements with expressive mark making”. With Dartmoor as such a commanding subject, I look forward to seeing her stunning work hung locally soon.

Nichola Williams

For more information please contact www.mariafloydart.com