Just Holding On Painting

Margot Waller Madgett is a visual artist working with an experimental approach, blending materials and methods to create contemporary, abstract, modular arrangements, and mixed media paintings and sculpture - to inspire mood, contemplation, and connection with oneself and the world around us. Margot was born and raised on the island of Guam, until moving to San Diego with her family in the early seventies. She studied Art at SDSU and Santa Monica College before launching into a lifelong discipline of self study, combining and experimenting with various mediums and techniques; including her signature portraiture commission series of children she coined “Art Image Portraiture”. She currently lives and works in coastal North San Diego County, California with her husband and two children. Margot has exhibited extensively throughout southern California and is in corporate and private collections. Art critic, Robert Pincus writes, “The CCG series is ethereal and absorbing, which evokes a series of prominent sources they include Cy Twombly and Brice Marden”. Margot works in acrylic paint along with other media such as oil, pencil, charcoal, oil stick, gold leaf, solvent transfers, and some sculptural elements such as recycled wood and metal on multiple handmade panels and canvases or a mixture of the two. Aware of the changes in the world and the environment we live, Margot has been incorporating more non toxic materials and eco-friendly techniques in her work over the years, constantly researching and experimenting with new ways to paint effectively and still be conscious of the effects manufactured art mediums can have on the environment. She builds wood panel supports to paint on from salvaged wood and uses discarded latex paints to save them from ending up in landfills. She also incorporates natural dyes and stains from organic materials such as coffee grinds, beet juice, onion skins, and grass. Margot has a collection of recycled objects as well as studio constructed tools made out of sticks and bamboo that she works with to create textures, lines and patterns. Some of Margot’s sculptural works consist of found natural wood debris off Cardiff beach or scraps of metal screen worked into something to be viewed and appreciated as opposed to being discarded waste.