margaret garrett
Born in 1965, Margaret Garrett spent her childhood training to be a dancer. At 16, she left home to join the Pennsylvania Ballet Company in Philadelphia. She then went on to dance with other companies and to work in theater and film as a dancer and choreographer. In her early twenties she began painting, finding something spiritually akin to dancing in the color and movement of the paint while at the same time opening up a vibrant new world to explore. Soon, she was devoting herself full time to painting and studying privately with Thorpe Feidt, a disciple of George McNeil. Ms. Garrett's work is included in numerous private and corporate collections.

Artist Statement
My childhood was spent dancing. It was my first love and also my first career. I mention this because I think that it informs my paintings. I see line as movement. Texture, form, the way that colors interact are all different manifestations of motion and energy.

The calligraphic mark. Line as gesture. My excitement in finding a true or honest line, formal and expressive, has led me to more involvement with drawing in my paintings.

Though the paintings are abstract, there is sometimes an iconographic suggestion in these lines of things found in nature, or of figures in motion, and when such imagery emerges I allow it to remain in the work without either deliberately enhancing it or disguising it.

I continuously make small drawings with ink on vellum and paintings on paper. I see these works as pieces in their own right, but they are also the media in which I develop my language as a painter, and they often serve as points of departure for larger works.