Ott’s show is both an arrival and a return to her childhood.

A first exhibit is a milestone in the life of any artist.

It’s one thing to make work in the privacy of the studio, quite another to show it – an act that implies a vision worth sharing.

Mary Louise Ott’s debut exhibit, “A New Season” is titled to acknowledge the occasion.

“This exhibit marks the beginning of a new season in the cycle of my life,” Ott said. “I’ve been making art for as long as I can remember, but this is the first time I’ve ever publicly displayed my work.”

Since moving from Oregon in 1997, Ott has made a name for herself on Bainbridge as an arts administrator.

Formerly an interior designer, her credits here include project coordinator for the BI Arts Education Community Consortium and a post as arts education coordinator for Bainbridge Arts and Crafts, as well as a stint on the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council’s Public Arts Committee. Most recently, she established an art docent resource center at Sakai Intermediate School.

But Ott says that supporting the visual arts made the call of her own artwork that much stronger.

“I don’t think I ever articulated the desire very much, but I always had the longing,” she said. “I’d think ‘if I can get this done,’ or ‘if I can save enough.’”

Ott’s self-doubt made her view her colored-pencil drawings as “not far out enough, not on the cutting edge enough to be art.”

But the generally supportive atmosphere of the island’s arts community encouraged her to take the risk. The final push towards artmaking came three years ago with a dream that, she says, needed no interpretation.

“In my dream I was told I only had three weeks to live,” she said. “And my first thought, in the dream was: ‘what about my art? I never did it.’”

Ott left the BAC post and set aside one day a week to work on her art.

She picked up the colored pencils she’d loved as a child and began to draw on black paper. Her choice was inspired by a workshop in which she created a mandala, a circular symbol of meditation, using the outline of her hand on a dark background.

“I loved how my hand stood out in white pencil against the black,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘oh, it would be cool, I could take other things and repeat them in a circle.’

By late summer, Ott had begun making what she thought of as color studies, repeating one leaf – and later other natural forms – to make circles. She gradated color through the shapes, following the color wheel through the spectrum of hues.

She also rendered single forms, often leaves, in a naturalistic style. She enlarged a dogwood flower and drew a Pine White butterfly she found in her yard.

“Because I’m a perfectionist, I’m kind of overwhelmed by the bigger world,” she said. “So I focus on things that are smaller, things that you have to really look at to notice.”

A drawing of pussy willows evokes a grade-school drawing Ott found in her mother’s collection of keepsakes.

“She had saved all of my drawings from first grade. And there was a pussy willow drawing that, when I opened it up, I could remember drawing and how much I’d enjoyed doing it.

“I thought, ‘you know I wish I’d looked at these sooner, because it was already there – the interest in color and shapes.’

“That sensation of the pencil on the paper was something that was familiar to me, and exciting.”

Ott often starts by making multiple photocopies of one component, rearranging the collage to find a composition she likes. She may even trace elements of the finished “sketch” onto the black page, or use transfer paper to get the outlines onto the black.

“I can’t sketch because I can’t erase (on black paper),” she said. “If I establish a little bit of an outline, then I can kind of sketch inside of that.”

The planning – a process Ott likes as much as drawing – works neatly for images with repeated components, like the large chambered nautilus shell she formed from a sequence of small shells spiralling outward.

The drawing of the chambered nautilus was inspired by lines from Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem “The Chambered Nautilus,” a poem Ott and her grandfather used to recite to each other.

Ott often incorporates verse in her drawing. “I’m really drawn to Ecclesiastes, ‘To everything there is a season.’”

“That’s why I call this (show) ‘A New Season.’ I feel like I’ve gone back to where I started, and reclaimed it.”