Margaret Kalvar-Bushnell

Artist Statement

I work in the media of oil paint and pastels and I am most interested in the elements of color and composition. While I start a composition with a fairly academically drawn rendering of a landscape, still life or portrait, I have been moving towards abstraction, deconstructing forms and shifting colors. My goal is to present an alternate, and aesthetically satisfying view of a subject. I experiment a lot and don't know at the start of a painting exactly how it will turn out as one decision leads to another. In my still lifes, the colors and forms often become more the subject of the work than the original composition, and with landscapes, I modify the original view to bring out the colors and to evoke the mood the scene conveys to me. I often work from photographs, although some of my landscapes are done en plein air, and most still lifes and portraits from live arrangements/models. The use of photographs reinforces my two-dimension focus and concentration on the pictorial space.
For me, color is my greatest joy, experimentation my biggest challenge, and composition the structure which holds the work together.