Margaret ross tolbert biography of alberta

Artist Margaret Ross Tolbert’s backyard is part botanical garden, part greyhound racetrack, part plein air art studio, and a touch of pure magic.

Here, behind a modest cinderblock house in the vintage neighborhood of Golfview, where narrow streets barely allow two cars clear passage, is a place infused with whimsy and wonder; a place where, it seems, almost anything can happen.

Tolbert, a willowy, 51-year-old painter and sculptor with dark brown hair and eyes to match, first exhibits her night-blooming cereus. It’s a gangly-looking cactus in a terra cotta pot with a fragrant white starburst still clinging to one of its spidery appendages. She cups the blossom in her hand and explains that the cereus flowers only after midnight; the blossoms close up with the first morning light. And yet, it’s already after 10 a.m., the sun has been up for hours, and this blossom shows no signs of fading any time soon.

Tolbert says, “You must meet Fay,” and when she calls out the name, a 7-year-old retired greyhound comes bounding out of the bushes.

“Show how fast you can run, Fay,” Tolbert says, clapping her hands together. Fay tears off through the yard, running crazy eights around the azaleas, her dappled coat a gray-brown blur as she chases a mechanical rabbit that exists only in her mind’s eye.

Tolbert leads the way to her “studio”-an area around the back wall of the house, where the still morning air is tinged with the scent of turpentine and the ground is speckled with paint.

“Some of my canvases are so big that I have to work out here,” she says before heading back indoors.

Inside the house, an encounter with one of Tolbert’s signature paintings leaves this author instantly transfixed by the luminescent colors on the canvas, transported to the craggy blue soul of a Florida spring. It’s as clear as the water shimmering on the canvas how this Gainesville artist’s paintings and sculptures have graced the walls and exhibit halls of museums, corporate centers, hotels and private homes in Florida and around the world.

EARLY INFLUENCES

“I always drew a lot” as a child, says Tolbert, who credits her success as an artist to her parents, E.L. and Frances Tolbert, who gave her the encouragement and self-discipline she needed to succeed. Tolbert’s father, a counseling psychologist who wrote seven major textbooks in his field, came to the University of Florida when Margaret was a teenager. But “he was a cartoonist and novelist at heart,” she says. Tolbert’s mother, who still lives in the family home just a block away from Margaret in Golfview, wrote and illustrated stories of her own. “My parents always said that you’re going to be best at what you like best.”

Tolbert’s artistic aspirations were shaped in school, as well. In one Virginia elementary school she attended, “If you got all your work done and you did your best, you got to go to the back of the class and paint,” she recalls. “Your social status went way up if you got to do that,” she says with a chuckle.

Tolbert was drawn to the visual arts for another reason: It was the best way to combine her many interests, including linguistics, architecture, dance, music, poetry and, of course, painting.

With the visual arts, “You just pour it all in the hopper and let it come out.” Plus, says Tolbert, there’s no way she could ever exhaust all of the possibilities of artistic expression. “You can always take it [artwork] to new levels.”

Tolbert earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art at the University of Florida, and has always managed to support herself by working in the visual arts- even if that meant, at one point, designing book jackets at the University Press of Florida.

Eventually, after holding a grantsupported position as an artist-inschools for Volusia County, she took the plunge into full-time painting.

“The first year I was off the grant support, I started taking some shots in the dark -entering competitions and things.” Invitations for commercial installations and public exhibitions soon followed.

FLORIDA LANDSCAPES

Tolbert painted her first Florida landscape - an oil on canvas of Little Blue Spring, part of Blue Springs Park in Gilchrist County - in 1983.

“I was a still-life painter at the time, and Eleanor Kaufmann, who owned an art gallery, said she wanted a Florida landscape.”

Tolbert at first balked at the idea, then decided to check out the springs. “The transparency and the reflection that I had worked so hard to set up in my still life paintings were all there in real life, which was exciting,” she says.

That was the first of dozens of contemporary paintings of Florida springs by Tolbert, whose style echoes such artists as Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Leon Gerome. Most of her landscapes are at least begun on site, with the canvas propped against a tree or even floated in a plastic container behind a kayak.

At times, the works seem to take on lives of their own, often becoming so expansive that they cover one or more walls of an exhibit hall. One of the largest, “Springs Diptych,” an oil on canvas Tolbert painted in 2003 and exhibited at the Gulf Cost Museum in Largo, is 8 feet tall and 11 feet wide. Other pieces, such as “Cloudspring,” a permanent installation at the Gulf Coast Museum, are comprised of mosaic- like clusters of small canvases hung high up toward the ceiling.

giving the effect of looking up from the bottom of a spring toward the surface. Yet another work, “At the Water’s Edge,” consists of a series of small canvases hung side-by-side at eye level, depicting “all that happens in that zone along the water’s edge.” That painting was part of an exhibit Tolbert curated at the Samuel P. Harn Museum in 2001, in memory of Tolbert’s professor and mentor, Hiram Williams. The canvases extended all along the walls of the exhibit hall, spilling out the door and into another room, in much the same way water travels.

“The springs paintings, even the scale of them, are about helping you imagine that you’re surrounded by them and descending into them,” says Tolbert.

ALONG THE ANCIENT TRADE ROUTES

Tolbert’s use of vibrant colors in her depictions of Florida springs might not have been possible had it not been for her travels abroad, especially to Turkey, a country she’s visited at least 20 times.

“I don’t think I could have painted the springs without going to Turkey and seeing whole different sets of color with an intrinsic luminosity, a quality that I don’t experience here,” she says.

Tolbert initially was drawn to Turkey because music and dance are such a big part of the culture. But the area’s history, architecture and friendly people kept her coming back. Every year, she visits a different region of the country, filling her sketchbooks with a “mother lode” of images. And her travels have opened up an entirely new portal for her paintings: doors.

“I have a romantic idea about the Silk Road,” says Tolbert, referring to the ancient East-West trade route that linked the Roman Empire with the imperial court of China. Tolbert pictures in her mind’s eye “the door to Allepo (Syria)” or some other place in all of its grandeur along the ancient trade routes during the Ottoman Empire (circa 1300 to 1992). At its peak in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire ruled over southeastern Europe and the Middle East.

“When I get there, the reality is that the door is in ruins, or maybe it’s been turned into a teahouse and newspaper stand with bicycles propped against it.” She sketches the door and refers to the sketch while she’s painting.

“I always work from these tiny drawings, because they somehow give me a little push in the right direction,” she says.

Last year, Tolbert traveled to Kars, on the border Turkey shares with Russia, which provided the inspiration for a series of door paintings now on exhibit at the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art in Richmond, Virginia, through February 12, 2006.

To Tolbert, the doors, like the springs, are portals that play upon the boundaries between the past and present, the familiar and unfamiliar.

“When I was a kid, I used to listen to recordings of ÔAlice in Wonderland’ and how she couldn’t get through the door because she was too big,” says Tolbert. “But there’s that longed for, dreamed of and imagined door in the distance,” she says of the unopened door beckoning us in. “All of that goes into the door paintings,” she says.

CREATING A WORLD THROUGH ART

In many respects, says Tolbert of her life as a painter, “I feel like Harold and the Purple Crayon,” the children’s book by Crockett Johnson about a boy named Harold who likes to draw with his purple crayon. When Harold can’t sleep, he draws a window. Then, he draws the moon. Then, he draws a ladder and climbs out the window. He decides to go to the moon so he draws a spaceship and gets in it.

“He draws his world,” says Tolbert. “I guess I see art that way. You can really create a world.”

PARAGRAPH 2 (USE THE WATER PHOTO IN THE PARAGRAPH):

These are a few of my favorite things

Margaret Ross Tolbert never tires of the natural beauty that inspires her paintings and sculptures. Here, she talks about a few other sources of inspirtation.

THE SPRINGS: I frequent Fanning, Ichetucknee, Juniper, Rainbow, Blue, Ginnie, Peacock…

STEAM: Coming off the streets and rooftops after a summer rain.

RUNNING ON LIMEROCK ROADS: [Tolbert attended UF on a full track scholarship.]

BICYCLE RIDING: On the Gainesville-Hawthorne trail and San Felasco Hammck.

LIKE OAKS: Particularly the trees on SW Second Avenue, right at Golfview and the law school. People don’t seem to mind traffic stopped in such a beautiful spot. The form of the arching oaks is one inspiration for my series of door paintings.

THE 13TH STREET WALL: There’s real talent in some of the graffiti. It’s also the “town crier” of our day, with congratulations, birthdays, etc. recorded on it.

NOCTURNAL WALKS: In the neighborhood, and stopping at Mom’s house (or stopping somewhere with Mom) for coffee.

COMING BACK TO GAINESVILLE: Coming down the steps of the plane at the airport into the warm, humid embrace of a Gainesville night.

DANCE AND MUSIC: The Gainesville dance scene, especially International Ethnic Dance on Friday nights at Gainesville Dance and Music Association, and the dance parties at Al and Euphrosyne Parker’s, where we do Greek and Ethiopian dance.

MAGARET ROSS TOLBERT AGE: 51 BIRTHPLACE: Raleigh, North Carolina YEARS IN GAINESVILLE: On and off for 20 years COLLEGE EDUCATION: Bachelor of arts in fine art from the University of Florida; master of arts in fine art from UF.