Margaret Clark

This series of paintings began with a medical photo of Moscow area children with the same birth defect. These children, for me, represented the dichotomy of child/adult, hope/despair, sickness/health, growth/decay, acceptance/dismissal, power/weakness, and what is beautiful and what is not. They became feral in my disparate, distorted landscapes, like child-adults at home in this wilderness, not tragic characters, but resilient, accepting and hopeful. There is a similarity of pattern on the surface of every image I paint, be it the bark of a tree, skin or rocks and when using multiple source photos for a single painting, this technique connects the images and gives cohesion to the painting. These six canvases placed next to each other form a larger painting.