Local Artist Has Ties to 2 Presidential Administrations

Tucked away on a Northfield side street, McLaughlin Glaze Ware shows that sometimes location isn't everything. Often it's word of mouth that causes business to spread.

"I never called the White House," says Winnetka artist Mary McLaughlin. "They phone me."

McLaughlin's usual clients are in the Chicago area, from the Civic Opera House in the Loop to North Shore residents shopping at Peachtree Place in Northfield. But a little luck lifted her work to the halls of Washington.

Hillary Clinton, who was born on the North Side of Chicago and grew up in Park Ridge, was given one of McLaughlin's enamel boxes as a gift by a Chicago friend. She soon wanted a collection for the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas.

McLaughlin, a self-described liberal, is bipartisan in her work: She has sent Laura Bush a collection of enamel ware for the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Texas.

"Very few people are doing this sort of thing in the United States," she said. "If somebody sees it, they come to me."

McLaughlin said she started her glaze ware business because all the other artisans were in Europe, and she saw a niche for an American company. She paints on china made in Lake County at Pickard China.  This month, she and her four assistants were working on an order of bowls for the White House Historical Association.

"These are scenes of the White House as you're walking around the White House, not just in space, but in time, historically," she said, describing the scenes painted on the side of the large bowls.

The designs are intricately conceived and meticulously hand-painted one at a time. McLaughlin creates a template for each order, and then her assistants replicate her work to complete the art.

McLaughlin's career in art  was an abrupt change from her earlier work—as a petroleum geologist. When her husband, Michael, took a job promotion to Chicago in 1986, she saw it as a chance to make a complete shift to her career.

She worked for small oil companies in Texas after she immigrated to the U.S. She is a founding member of the Association of Environmental Geologists, and drives and gas-sipping Toyota Prius.

Michael McLaughlin is the president of the national Society of Actuaries. In Winnetka, they raised two daughters who went to New Trier Township High School and now live in Chicago.

Her work in the oil industry revealed to her early on the dangerous long-term effects of releasing carbon buried for millions of years below the earth into a fragile atmosphere. Planting trees will help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while helping fight world hunger.

While she continues to market her artistic designs, McLaughlin has also begun a nonprofit called Trees That Feed last year that plants fruit-bearing trees in Jamaica--a way to return to her concerns for the earth's environment that led her first into geology.