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Margaret Shelton was born August 15,
1915 on a farm near Bruce, east of Edmonton, Alberta, of
English parents. She grew up in Drumheller Valley in
south-central Alberta. From an early age she began to
draw, and was encouraged by both parents and teachers. Her
talent was already apparent by age 14 (1929) when she had
produced some paintings and four very creditable
pen-and-ink sketches, which are still in existence.
Throughout her high-school years, she sketched her
surroundings, roaming the hills and mine works, drawing
and painting whatever seemed of interest.
While attending Normal school (a
teacher’s college in Calgary) during 1933-34, she also
attended evening classes at the Provincial Institute of
Technology and Art (PITA) where she felt fortunate to
study drawing and painting under the direction of A.C.
Leighton, the celebrated English landscape painter. From
1934 to 1943 she attended PITA on scholarships, under the
tutelage of Leighton and H.G. Glyde among others. In the
summers, she enjoyed sketching old barns and mountain
scenes. In 1941 she learned Japanese wood block
printmaking techniques from W.J. Phillips.
Shelton taught school periodically
for a few years and also worked at an advertising agency
in Toronto for six months as a commercial artist before
deciding to commit to undertaking a full-time painting and
printmaking career.
Margaret Shelton was a prolific
artist, best known for her delicate watercolour paintings
and her intricate woodcut and linocut prints. With a deep
passion for nature and the diversity and beauty of the
Alberta landscape, Shelton’s interpretations are
distinctively vital and energetic. Her contributions to
the development of printmaking in Canada are significant,
having created hundreds of prints in her career. Her works
form part of the collections at the National Gallery in
Ottawa and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. She exhibited
with the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers
(CPE), the Canadian Society of Graphic Art (CSGA) and the
Calgary Sketch Club.
“Unlike earlier Canadian artists
including the CPR artists … and the Group of Seven,
Shelton chose to interpret nature directly, without any
romantic notion that it stood for or represented something
else. Hers was a simpler and less spectacular rendering of
the world than that of earlier romantic artists. She did
not choose to convey the wildness, grandeur or primitivism
of nature. She selected straightforward scenes which she
depicted in a well-executed representational style that
relied on nature for its impulse.” (Patricia Ainslie,
Margaret Shelton: Block Prints 1936-1984 Glenbow Museum,
exhibition catalgue, Calgary, Alberta, 1984, p.8)
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