Local Artist Spotlight: Mary Chadwell Seaborne

Some talent skips a generation. In this family, it just kept going.

You already know Eleanor Baker's work from our shelves. What you might not know is that art runs straight up her family tree to her mother, Mary Chadwell Seaborne, a San Marcos painter whose own path to the easel took a few detours through architecture school, city planning, and a cross-country road trip in a 1974 Fiat.

Mary was drawing before she could really do much else, growing up in a remote pocket of the Texas Hill Country where her mother, an art and literature devotee, would load up all five kids and drive two hours to San Antonio just to visit the museums. After the family moved to South Carolina, Mary kept at it through high school and into a stint at the Rhode Island School of Design, which didn't stick (too free-form, too expensive, not quite her speed). She finished her degree in History with a minor in Art instead, and paid her way through college sketching houses in nice neighborhoods for $50 to $75 a pop. After graduation, she took that little business on the road, driving across the country alone at 23 with her bike strapped to a 1974 Fiat, sketching homes from San Antonio to California to Montana along the way.

Her interests eventually shifted toward land use and environmental planning, which brought her to UT Austin for a graduate degree. That's also where she met her husband Jack, an architecture student, playing soccer. They married in 1983 and moved through Houston, Albuquerque, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis for work, raising two daughters along the way. One of those daughters is Eleanor.

Art took a back seat during the busiest parenting years, but it never fully left, and Mary eventually found her way back to painting.

Mary's "San Marcos River Tubing" print

Now Mary and Jack call San Marcos home. Jack still works in architecture. Mary has traded planning meetings for watercolors, walks through the nearby preserve, and a studio practice rooted in the Hill Country landscape she grew up loving.  Her San Marcos River paintings are some of our top-sellers!  These days, mother and daughter swap art, photos, and ideas the way most families swap recipes, proof that creativity really is the family business.

We're proud to carry work from both of them. Come see Mary's pieces in the shop, and while you're at it, take a look at Eleanor's too. It's not every day you get to shop two generations of talent under one roof!  

Eleanor's "San Marcos Rustic Landscape" print