Marney grew up in North Vancouver in the sixties and has been interested in perception, consciousness and creativity for most of her life. In the late sixties and early seventies, she earned a Ph.D. from UBC on the art and poetry of William Blake.
In the early nineties, she decided to revisit her first passion, art. She learned techniques of brushwork and wetness control from classes in Chinese Brush Painting, and from her lifelong mentor Emily Carr, she learned about the struggle to express spirit in art. For Marney, flowers have always had the power to enliven inner joy, so she studied flowers with local artists Caren Heine and Ann Hunter. She went on to develop her own unique style of floral watercolours: large, vibrant, back-lit close-ups that reveal the spiritual essence of the flowers she paints and beyond them, her own spiritual interconnectedness with the natural world. For Marney, watercolour is the perfect medium, with its spontaneous flowing quality and its clear, transparent colour that allows the light of the paper to glow through.
