Margaret Ann Withers primarily works with paper, watercolor, ink and enamel. She layers media based on color, viscosity and texture. Once she applies media to paper, she agitates the paper to render happen-chance 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. Flattened, monochromatic houses and telephone poles are woven into the composition.

Conceptually, Withers’s pseudo-narratives evoke a mythical map that has been derived from her childhood in the rural American South of the 1970's. 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 casted herself as the leading role in enumerable fictions, which she had contrived. Her current work juxtaposes physical topography from this decade against her emotional reaction to landscape.

Withers lives and works in Manhattan. She received a BA in Literature from Texas A&M University, College Station, TX; however after leaving TX in 1991, she began to work with hand-sculpted porcelain figures and vessels and eventually with mixed-media oil paintings in which she included cast porcelain heads set into canvas. In 2004, she attended the MFA program at The University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, yet did not matriculate. Instead, Withers chose to move to New York City. Her art has shown extensively in the US, and internationally in Europe, China and Moscow.