Margaret Montgomery

About The Artist:

Margaret Montgomery is a New York City based artist.  She works primarily from life, in a representational mode.  Although,she sometimes uses photos she has taken as source material, most of her cityscapes/landscapes were done on site, in venues around the city.  The influence of living in a big, and often impersonal place can be seen in Montgomery's approach to cityscapes.  However, even her still lifes project a psychological distance----a sense of anonymity----even while drawing the viewer in.

Some Thoughts:

I work exclusively with watercolor nowadays.  It has a translucent, luminous quality that is unique to the medium.  Watercolor, also, best captures a transitional quality, which is one aspect of the physical world that I wish to express in my paintings. My main artistic concern is with the surface appearance of reality.  I try to capture the essence of phenomena.  Taking a somewhat reductionist approach, I focus on the basic mass, colors and tonal values of my subject matter, relying on the play of light and shadow to create form.

The Main challenge for a representational painter is to translate the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface.  The way I approach that problem is by emphasizing spatial relationships----regardless of whether the subject is a landscape, still life or figure.  The relation of form to form is what gives a painting structure.  And, that in turn, provides the context for the subject matter.  The forms do not exist independently, only in the context of their relationship to other forms.  The result is paintings that have been deliberately constructed, creating a powerful sense of the physical world.

It is my hope that my paintings have an impact on the way the viewer percieves physical phenomena.  Painting is a re-imagining of physical reality after all; therefore, the success of any work of art can be measured by the extent to which it influences the viewer's perceptions of reality.