Through the Eyes of An Artist
life accordingly.
young age, she first bloomed both on and off the stage at numerous successful Civic Light Opera and Old Town Studios Theatre productions.
After several years serving as Art Director for her family’s Stanton Creative Services, Inc. -- a full-service advertising, public relations and
video production agency – Margaret’s creative passion turned to painting. Following that passion, in 1983 she moved to San Diego to
study and work with one of that city’s finest and best known professional artists – Lawrence Mansker.
San Diego County Law Library 1988
In the ten years that followed, Stanton produced original oils and watercolors for Art Consultants, Collectors and Interior Designers. Today,
her commissioned paintings and murals can be seen in homes, hospitals, libraries, hotels, restaurants, office buildings, airports and other
public spaces throughout the United States.
Stanton's first exhibition – created in conjunction with sculptures by renowned artist Doran Rosenthal for the very first San Diego ArtWalk --
featured twelve large oil paintings. At first glance these were simply huge desert landscapes . . . but a closer look revealed a surrealistic
interior level that incorporated imaginative and unique sub-themes.
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30" x 40" Oils 1988 |
continued to sell well through a Santa Fe Gallery for several years.
Both her inspiration and her methods were changing. First, the transition was propelled by her visits to Europe, where she and her husband, a
native of Prague, visited museums and galleries. For the first time her life, Stanton was able to see in person countless masterpieces from
impressionism - Cezanne to Picasso to Matisse - and the experience had a profound impact on her. Secondly, Stanton began painting with
acrylics. So, not only was she looking for new pictorial avenues to explore, but she was discovering new ways of painting in the new medium.
For a while, however, Stanton continued to paint in a variant of realism, a style that allowed her to achieve a lot of success.
For instance, in the commissioned murals she painted at that time, her own personal brand of realism continued to exhibit some traces of
surrealism, wherein the subjects were being pulled together, arranged into a scene, and altered to heighten a certain presence or perspective.
However, now there was an added vivacity and sparkle of color, influenced by the impressionistic masterpieces she had just seen.
brushwork - clearly impressionistic. The public responded to the enlivened look of this painting with a "People"s Choice" award at the Waikaloa
Center's annual juried exhibition
At that time, Stanton began spending entire summers in Europe developing a looser painting style in the open air in Prague and around Macha's
Lake in northwest Bohemia. The unpredictability of the new medium and the challenge of the open air tested Stanton's abilities, and for a few
years she worked to develop her methods. The greatest influence on Stanton's recent work was a visit to the Blue Rider's Exhibit in Munich
in 2001. Simple, yet brilliantly colored impressions of village life truly impressed the artist.
Through their influence, the paintings of Margaret Stanton were now more dazzling in their use of primary colors; red, yellow and blue. These
colors, the colors of Kandinski, Gabriele Munter, Franz Marc, and the American Artist Alfred Maurer, are evident in the 2004 seascapes by Stanton.
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16" x 20" Acrylics 2004 |
Stanton's seascapes incorporate these primary colors with a highly charged surface; far different from the smoother, tighter surfaces of her
earlier work. Stanton's method, now, was to start each painting in the open air, and then work on each one in the studio, giving each painting a
chance to develop extremely brilliant color and a highly expressive surface. As a result of the innumerable touches and layers of paint on the
surface, these paintings have a far larger internal scale, a larger sense of size than their 16" x 20" dimensions would indicate. The depth of the
temperature felt and expansiveness of the atmosphere sensed in these paintings owes just as much to the interesting surface treatment as it
does to the color.
Since 2005 Margaret Stanton's work has been represented by The Harbor Gallery on the northern Kona coast of the Big Island with a
featured exhibition that same year. As an active member of the East Hawaii Cultural Center, Margaret's Art is frequently exhibited in
juried shows both there and at the Wailoa Center in Hilo, Hawaii. All of Margaret's work is presently showing at HawaiiArt.com,
Margaretstanton.com and numerous Art directories on the World Wide Web.
work in acrylics that defines the characteristics of her recent paintings and a more modern art.
18" x 24" Acrylic 2007
can be found under each blown up image.