Merry Kohn Studio .::. About the Artist

Merry Kohn was born on December 26, 1951 in Fort Meade, Maryland. Being the daughter of a military officer, and the proverbial "army brat," Merry traveled the world over with her family. Her many experiences abroad stirred her creative side and she began painting at an early age. Merry Kohn Buvia now makes her home on the beautiful Monterey Peninsula, yet you can see the influences of her travels through Europe, the Orient and the United States evident in her work.

Having painted all her life, Merry is basically a self-taught artist and paints with a whimsical, yet uncompromising wit. The titles of her paintings usually indicate a joke or a story that has to be searched for in the canvas.

Collected internationally, Merry's work has been shown across the United States, in Japan and Korea.

In 1993, Merry's wonderful design "Made in Paris," was selected at the European Workshop to be used by UNICEF as a 1995 Christmas Advent Calendar. It was also selected as a Christmas card. In 1998, they produced four of her images into cards. In 1998, she was commissioned by the internationally renowned, Monterey Bay Aquarium, to do three paintings to be made into a gift line for their stores.

Merry and Friends in Japan In 2003, 2004 and 2005, she went to Japan to do several very successful shows of her paintings, for the Osaka company, Ecóle de Paris. It was the experience of a lifetime.

In 2014, on a visit to New Masters Gallery in Carmel, who has represented her for over 45 years, The owner, Bill Hill made a fateful decision. On bringing in a little otter painting she'd done, to use a tiny frame that had been in the studio for a good long while, he said, "Let's put it in the front showcase window." It was gone by the end of the day. They've been swimming away ever since.

In 2023, she went a different direction with her paintings. Always a fan and a sometimes collector of the incomparable Eyvind Earle, she tried once again to capture some of his magic in a new series of paintings called simply, “Big Sur”. While she never studied with him, she has always studied his art and this time, was happy enough with the result to bring them to the gallery. They have been very well received.

The otters will keep coming and other odds and ends, but so will the Big Sur paintings.

"Know you what it is to be a child?... it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul."