Dancer/painter Margaret Garrett: the interview; hello 2024
Dancer/paint Margaret Garrett: the interview; hello 2024
Cross pollination between art forms recurs in my work. When I got serious about writing, my goal was to get music on the page, even as I recognized the impossibility of it. In THREE MUSES, this aspiration took the form of a dancer protagonist, with music threading through the book.
I am endlessly curious about how other artists make cross pollinate. I met Margaret Garrett at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has spent a lifetime channeling her professional ballet experience into painting.
In Margaret’s words—
I started dancing at a very young age in my hometown, joined the Pennsylvania Ballet [now Philadelphia Ballet] as an apprentice at 16, and finished high school by mail. I went on to dance with the Cleveland Ballet as a soloist. After a few years, I started to feel restless; I wanted to explore other things. I left the company and moved to NYC, where I worked with different choreographers, did a bunch of my own choreography for theater companies, studied acting and modern dance, and began to paint.
The painting happened by accident. My husband, composer Bruce Wolosoff, brought art supplies home because color and art inspired him musically, and I discovered I really enjoyed painting. I made piece after piece (he never finished his first one!). Soon I had a teacher and chose to focus on making art. Something in painting is similar to dance, a kind of spatial thinking.
About dance in Margaret’s work:
Dancing so intensely throughout my life affects how I think. I see line as movement. My abstract paintings frequently evoke dance in the way that shapes interact. I’ve also been around a lot of music as a dancer and that’s in my art as well. I think of the rhythm or counterpoint in a piece.
When I met Margaret, she was experimenting in a brown and tan winter field taking videos of herself that ultimately resulted into transfixing, kaleidoscopic, moving (literally and figuratively) work—
In 2017, I started dancing again, filming myself and using clips from that footage to create choreographed, collaged videos. This quickly evolved into a renaissance of my first love, dance, and a discovery of a way to incorporate that into my art. I am fascinated with the visual language that this combination of technology and the moving body creates. In my videos, I use the body as a paintbrush to draw and create shapes. Then I use the editing process to ‘choreograph’ what essentially becomes a visual collage: a self-portrait dance, working with the same compositional elements as my paintings - linear movement, shape, rhythm, and the unfolding of contrapuntal patterns.
About dance and our aging bodies:
I began the video work in my fifties after not having danced with any focus for many years. I find it interesting to do this work with the body I have now. It is less about trying to do incredible things and more about finding my organic movement and the shapes that the body can make. I am working on a video of women of different ages dancing. I love the way the 70 year olds move as much as the way the 20 year olds do. You see the essence of a person when they’re dancing. One of the beauties of painting is that a person can continue to do that as they age and they can keep getting better. Some of my favorite painters worked into their 90’s. That’s inspiring!
You can see Margaret’s stunning work at Planthouse Gallery in New York, 55 W 28 Street, through January 13. In addition, she’ll be doing an in-person public conversation/ walk-and-talk at Planthouse Gallery January 10th at 6:30 PM with New York Times culture writer Laura Van Straaten about her current exhibition, "The Still Point."
If you’re in the DMV, I hope you can join me at 5 PM this Sunday January 7 at Glen Echo Town Hall. I’ll be interviewing Linda Ambrus Broenniman about her riveting memoir, THE POLITZER SAGA, tracing her unknown Hungarian Jewish ancestors after a house fire revealed the contents of a box containing family secrets.
Warm wishes for the New Year and beyond.
Love, Martha