Featured Tranquilista: 
Mary Catherine Starr is a a yoga teacher, studio director (at Tranquil Space Arlington!), blogger, and painter living and working in Arlington, VA. As an artist and yogini, she spends her time trying to find the perfect balance between working, painting, living an active, healthy lifestyle, and pursuing her creative passions.

Originally from Atlanta, GA, Mary Catherine moved to the Washington, DC area after living in New York City for a couple of years post-college. She earned her B.A. from Centre College in Danville, KY, where she studied Art & English and completed her Senior Exhibition in Oil Painting. A lifelong “creative type,” Mary Catherine fell in love with painting while in school, and since then, has explored working with oils, acrylics, watercolor, and mixed media. Although she doesn’t paint many self-portraits, her body of work has become a self-portrait of sorts—a portrait of a young, urban woman trying to live a creative life and enjoying the simple pleasures along the way. She paints what she is surrounded by in her everyday existence—a dress, a pair of shoes, a lightbulb, a yogi holding a pose, a large metal pot. Her work is about breathing new life into everyday objects, and imbuing unexceptional viewpoints with exceptional significance. It’s all about seeing things you’ve seen a thousand times, but seeing them in a new way.

In late 2010, Mary Catherine decided to take a great leap of faith and quit her full-time desk job to pursue a somewhat more unconventional path. She started a blog, began teaching yoga full-time and working at Tranquil Space, and devoted more time and energy to painting in her studio. Since then, Mary Catherine has launched a painting shop on Etsy (where she sells both originals and prints of her work), had a piece featured in the Washingtonian, illustrated Tranquilologie, and shown in a number of exhibitions and boutiques in the DC area. A number of her pieces are currently shown in private collections, as well. You can follow her creative journey on her blog, Starr Struck.