Abstract Expressionist painter
Maggie Macdonald is an artist living and working in the Upstate of South Carolina. She creates large-scale abstract art inspired by the movement of the ocean and by the intricacies of human interaction. Her pieces, often accompanied by poetic or literary elements, share the stories of her current reality; of what it is to be human. Her signature style of vast fields of color soaked into raw canvas and linen have been shown in galleries and presented at art shows all-over the States. Maggie has been an artist since her youth and has always delighted in her own creativity, learning and cultivating her personal style through her early years and well into her twenties. Maggie graduated from Converse College with a degree in Studio Art in 2018 and has been creating, painting murals and traveling ever since. Her work is in collections around the world and has been featured by Saatchi, Arhaus, and HomeGoods to name a few. You can find Maggie working in her studio, building and stretching her own canvases to paint, or packing up her trusted van to present her work across the nation.
My large-scale abstract works concern themselves with many things. The work I create is about hope and aesthetic beauty. It’s about processing the current realities of life and transforming emotion into powerful imagery. My art is about celebrating literature and pushing my poetic pursuits. It’s about choosing to create beauty in a world that is often filled with darkness; furthermore combating the sorrows of the day to day and pushing myself to create new from the old. In many ways what I create offers a comfort, a pause, for me as a human desperate to contribute something of value to an ever changing landscape. The inclusion of text in my work, both legible and illegible, serves to deepen the connection, not only between myself and the work, but also each piece and the viewer. There is a story behind each poem or literary inclusion that is often sparked or inspired by the realities of my present tense. It is not uncommon that I find myself, as the viewer, delighted in awe of the newness brought forth from humble elements such as paints, inks, pastels and raw linen and canvas. I create these works not only because I feel I have something to say, but more often than not I find that these works turn out to be exactly what I need to see.
