Google Creatives Embrace New Internal Art Gallery Written by Kevin Marks
The Painter / Photo-technician
Mary Vidnovic maryvidnovic.com Instagram: mvidnovicart
Mary Vidnovic, a corporate photo-technician, describes her reaction to one of the famous perks of working for Google: “I remember when I first started working here, everyone was really excited about all the free food,” she says. “But I was like, ‘There’s a gallery night? I can put my paintings up? What?!” A talented Google artist that is energized and activated by a chance to show her work, Vidnovic has been retouching and editing photos since she graduated from San Jose State, but her true passion is painting. Her website declares that she paints “as much as humanly possible.” For Vidnovic, that means spending most Saturdays in her Aptos studio crafting beautifully abstract portraits and landscapes. Hers is a body of work whose color palette seems breezily informed by the coastal regions of the Bay. Vidnovic began her career as a photo retoucher for a local wedding photographer. She enjoys the cleanliness of making art in the digital realm, but prefers the real, natural messiness of painting and the challenge of rendering human beings in portrait. “I really enjoyed trying to get to the photo-realism place,” she says. “After I got there, I started experimenting with adding in more abstract features.” Her work strikes a seemingly perfect balance between the abstract and the real, which may be a way to describe the life of a creative in high tech—doing “real” creative work from nine to five, but being drawn to more abstract, personal projects as well. The Google gallery has afforded a place to flex those more abstract muscles. “It’s really nice to see that there’s other creative people in the building who have all these different talents. It’s nice to have that community here.” C