MONROE — Marie Fritz Perry has written and illustrated two children’s books and also has one she’s working on for adults. She really loves art, finding it impactful, and wants to help make it accessible to all here in Southern Wisconsin.

She is a long-time artist and enjoyer of art, while also working as the executive director at the Monroe Arts Center. She specializes in oil painting, soft pastel like what was used by the impressionists, and pencil work. Of the three art mediums she uses, her favorite depends on how she’s feeling at the time.

“Mediums are somewhat moody, and so what mood I’m in, I could either jump between oil or pastel,” she said. “Pastel has really got kind of a space of its own and attitude of its own, and if you’re in the mood to be patient and you want to have a happening, then I’d do pastel. If I wanted to be really precise and I want to achieve exactly what I’m going for, then oil.”

She was interested in art from a young age, partly because of her mother. Not only did she see her mother enjoying art as a career, but she also encouraged Marie to do it herself.

“I had a really fabulous upbringing. I would have considered my upbringing to be very normal, but now I realize it wasn’t. My mother was a fashion illustrator and she only freelanced, so she worked from home, had an incredible career her whole life and then segued into oil painting. She went back to college in her 40s and completed an art degree in oil painting. She specialized in figurative work, and so my earliest memories are either modeling for her or sitting in her studio,” she said. “She would set up an easel right next to her own and I was the youngest, and maybe I got spoiled that way, but I would paint along with her and I just loved it. Either she saw that and did that for me, or I was a pest.”

Her favorite art pieces are those she has done that depict the stages of grief. The way she has dealt with her grief through art has been interesting and new to her, but also instrumental in her processing of that grief.

“I lost my husband to cancer about seven years ago and had a lot of trouble getting back into my career right afterwards. We have three kids, so I was really busy trying to keep everybody going, and art was never a therapy for me, but I had promised him I was going to write about our experience and I couldn’t. For the first time, I couldn’t tackle it, I couldn’t write it,” Perry explained. “I started thinking a lot about the grief process and how everybody talks about there are seven stages of grief, and we expect to go through all of them. And I’m like, nope, I have number seven today; I have number one tomorrow. I decided I was going to paint the way I felt. I started doing self-portraits of how I felt in different stages, and so those will be part of how I illustrate the memoir that I’m working on, and actually, it helped me to then start to write.”

Since she was interested in doing art from a young age, she also started out young, and her passion for the craft only grew from there. She always knew what she wanted to do and she stuck with it.

“I knew from the age of seven that I wanted to be a children’s book writer and illustrator. People would ask me, ‘what do you want to grow up to be?’ and it was always the same answer. By the time I finished college, it was still the same answer, but then to figure out how to do it was really, really hard,” she said.

There was no clear way forward from there to begin writing children’s books, so she had to figure it out on her own.

“There’s no path forward to learn how to write picture books. There’s no course you can take, so I decided after I graduated with art that I was going to write one. I ended up getting my master’s degree in library science because I could do visual and I could study picture books that way. I ended up teaching picture books before I ever created one,” Perry said. “You mentor yourself then by all that reading and looking at all the different art styles, so in my late 20s I published my first book.”

Perry is very inspired by emotions when it comes to her art and is interested in telling a story through the pieces she creates.

“I feel like, in anything, whether I’m doing a landscape or I’m doing a portrait or I’m doing an illustration, how I convey emotion is really important. I think, for me, art tells stories, and maybe that’s part of being both an artist and writer. I’m interested in the story I’m going to perceive from a piece of art, and even with abstract art — not that I do abstract art, but I feel like there’s a story there,” she said.

She “really loved” being a part of this fall’s Main Street Monroe Art Walk and enjoyed participating in it, feeling like the community engagement was incredible and something very special.

“I think the Art Walk is such a wonderful thing to let people feature. I think we had a great community turnout for it, so things like that are just wonderful in terms of a community choosing to welcome the arts, so I’m really excited to be a part of that,” Perry said. “People approached it in different ways. I demonstrated pastel that day, other people were selling and had all their final wares and wanted to talk about what they were working on. It was really neat to see different presentations and so many different mediums.”