“Physicians have long been viewed as powerful healers on the treacherous battlefield of life. Their image—entrusted with the care of others and mantled in the cloak of the devine—evolves with the science and the art of medicine itself. Physicians are armed with incredible powers to heal, yet the complex relationships between patients, insurance and care providers has lagged far behind.

Caring for others evokes powerful emotions and effective therapy can assume many forms, medical and non-medical alike. Music can trigger the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers. A beautiful painting, a favorite song, a poem, or a good laugh can do the same. Art helps meet the needs of the whole person, not just the body. If we use the combined abilities of the mind and spirit as well as the body, we can heal faster and more completely. Art is the pathway to this objective. Art establishes the basic human truths that are the key to the concept of ourselves. Art is the intersection of the holistic trinity of mind, body, and spirit.”  Mary Anne Bartley

The distinguished artist and noted critic Burt Wasserman reviewed and wrote about Bartley’s exhibitions in Art Matters (tri-state regional art journal) describing her as a “leading edge contemporary artist of great power and insight. A living treasure of America whose grammar and vocabulary of design speak eloquently in the language of vision. Bartley’s visual expression is unique and venturesome. She paints with infinite gusto, exerting personal initiatives toward free expression . . . her idiom is unlike anyone else’s anywhere.”

Through powerful colors and striking images, Mary Anne Bartley connects us with our own interior voices. Transcending early training in academic realism, she moved to impressionism and beyond. Her tools have evolved from the triple-zero paint brush of medical illustrator to 5-inch housepainter's brush and computer technology. Her paintings have grown from watercolors on gallery walls to 30 foot images and heroic kites soaring into four-story spaces in hospitals and universities. The dynamics and colors of her paintings capture the sweep of human emotion, becoming primal expressions of joy, rage, sorrow, death.

Bartley co-founded and serves as Vice Chairman of the Section on Arts Medicine at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and Artist-in-Residence at Villanova University. Selected in a four-state search for an artist/scholar, she inaugurated and teaches a course in arts medicine at MCP Hahnemann University, which directly involves medical students in the process of creativity. Art is an important component of medicine and healing because it helps meet the needs of the whole person. Students are taught the principles of healing through art, but more importantly, experience the healing themselves.

Bartley’s odyssey into art's healing powers began while she was national director of AFNA National Education and Research Fund. Awarded $21 million, she pioneered the development of a cutting-edge program cited by the US Dept. of Health & Human Resources as a model for urban education. Since then, more than 10,000 minority young people have been graduated from colleges, universities, medical, law and graduate schools across the nation. Bartley's program provided profound insights into the relevance of the arts and the therapeutic value of arts medicine.

The diversity of these experiences has had a profound impact on Bartley’s art. Reflecting the complexity of human emotions, she selected kites as dynamic symbols of flight, prayers and freedom and unleashed a flotilla of powerful kite paintings, which soar into space in galleries, hospitals, medical schools, corporations and sacred spaces. Individual kite paintings reflect the holistic properties of healing and the intrinsic union of mind-body-spirit. A dialogue is begun and communication flows freely within the mind, body, and spirit. Alive with powerful images and colors, they encourage us to explore and marshal the physical, emotional spiritual and psychological aspects of healing. Glistening and shimmering, the kites take flight, soaring into the stream of life . . . stoking the imagination and evoking startling and poetic images of ourselves and others. The quintessential lesson to be learned: art is—in and of itself—powerfully therapeutic. Time disappears, noises diminish, peace comes, the body relaxes and the artist within each of us emerges.