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

Born in Mesa, Arizona, Garoutte is a teacher, mentor, and active facilitator in art education through the public and private sphere. 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 attempts to explore vignettes of dreams and repressed memory, framed within the surreal and the mundane. 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 to painting.  

Garoutte’s aim is to create a visual dialogue between her works to serve as an inquiry of the subconscious and the human psyche, as well as explore environments of human isolation where humankind ends and nature begins. 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 work is inspired by 20th-century painting, modern and contemporary photography and film - drawing from the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Hopper, Gregory Crewdson, Evelyn Lambart, and the dreamlike, surrealist imagery of the 1960’s art films of Sergei Parajanov.

Represented at Argyle Fine Art in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada