Welcome

Retirement just does not suit this artist. At 90, she is in her studio most days of the week. If she is not busy painting, she is studying the completed pieces to see if they are ready for framing. Mary Alice lives with her paintings anywhere from one week to a month, tweaking little minute parts to get them right or out comes the gesso and the process begins again. She lives and dreams her paintings. She is the hardest critic of her work.

Born and raised in the Tampa Bay Area, she and her husband, now deceased, bought their home in Pisgah Forest some 27 years ago, using it as their vacation home. Two years ago she became tired of the urban growth in the state and decided to move to her home in Pisgah Forest. She converted her two car garage into a studio and this is where you find her most every week day. Braukman says she has never had a single regret.

A nationally known artist and teacher, she holds signature status in the National Watercolor Society as well as many others. In 2022 she was one of three selected jurors of the National Watercolor Society International Exhibition and served in selecting look those receiving their NWS signature status.

She is a past president of the Florida Watercolor Society and was director of the Kanuga Water-media Workshops held in Hendersonville, NC, for 15 years. Mary Alice was invited to be guest editor of the American Artist's Watercolor special issue: Experimental Approaches to Water-media and Watercolor in 2001. She was also selected to be one of the top 10 teachers nationwide by the American Artist Magazine that same year.

Mary Alice holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Art Education and Fine Arts from Florida State University. She continued graduate studies at the University of Colorado and Eckerd College in the Tampa Bay area.

As a painter Mary Alice’s primary focus is on texture and color. Her life experiences and everyday visions get filtered through her artistic eye and transformed into her abstract body of work. Her experiences come forth in a myriad of techniques – perhaps a pour of brilliant transparent paint or layers of collage and brush strokes that unearth colors and textures beneath. She believes a painter must paint the way he or she feels and there is no one method that will guarantee success or acceptance. Mary Alice paints because it is who she is. She simply must.



As a painter my primary focus is on texture and color.

"As a Water Media Artist, Mary Alice's life experiences and everyday visions get filtered through her artistic eye, and transformed into an abstract body of work.

There is joy and passion . . adventure and reflection.

Her expressions come forth in a myriad of techniques - a pour on paper, a pour of colors manipulated on paper, or by layers of brush strokes; a collage, or an assemblage.


Her paintings will move you, ground you, and uplift you."

Nancy Markoe