Mary L. Garoutte is a professional visual artist based in New Brunswick, Canada.

Born in Mesa, Arizona, Garoutte’s 21 year art career has spanned working in the professional art gallery sphere, teaching and mentoring. Garoutte’s multi-faceted art practice also includes live performance painting for events such as fundraisers, benefit concerts, retreats and weddings. She has spent most of her artistic career traveling between the US and Canada, and has exhibited throughout Canada and internationally, notably at the University of Ulsan in Ulsan, South Korea. Garoutte holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Garoutte’s recent studio work are explorations of dreams and memory, which probe the sub-conscience. Most of her visual chronicles are extracted from her own dreams; some random and others interconnected to form a psychological and deeply personal narrative framed within a modest surrealist approach, bordering magic realism in her paintings. Focusing on the elements of personal and societal fears and aspirations, Garoutte creates pieces that are cryptic, and a somewhat autobiographical self-portrait through symbolism, interior spaces, and the use of the interplay of light and darkness. 

Garoutte’s aesthetic draws predominantly from 20th-century painting, as well as modern and contemporary photography and film. She attributes her greatest influence from Edward Hopper and Lucian Freud, and narratively from the cinematographic work of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Photographer Gregory Crewdson, Evelyn Lambart, and the dreamlike, surrealist imagery of the 1960’s art films of Sergei Parajanov.