Margaret Withers

April 29, 2012

Margaret Withers

Margaret Withers primarily works with paper, watercolor, ink and enamel and layers media based on color, viscosity and texture. Once she applies media to paper, she agitates the paper to render forms that dissolve into an uncharted landscape. Withers’ conflates randomness with deliberation, as she paints a motif of imaginary characters, eyes connected by tendrils to high-gloss enamel mouths and flattened, monochromatic houses and telephone poles are all woven into the composition.

Conceptually, Withers’ anti-story paintings reveal an illuminating narrative cut, as if a flash-bulb pop across the space of an implied narrative; this cut allows for a pause in order to engage the viewer and allow them to spend some time in this space, to figure out the story or to pretend a new one.

She was born in Austin, TX, in 1965. Since her father worked in the oil industry, she and her family often relocated. During her childhood, Withers’ coped with constant change by acting as a playwright who cast herself as the leading role in enumerable fictions.

Withers attended Texas A&M University where she received a BA in Literature. In 1991, she moved to Colorado and worked primarily in hand-built porcelain. In 1998, she started a series of mixed-media oil paintings with cast porcelain heads pushed into the canvas. In 2004, she attended CU Boulder’s MFA program but did not matriculate, instead deciding to move to New York City in 2006. Her art has shown extensively in the US, and internationally in Europe, China and Moscow.

Contact Withers at her website.

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