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Margaret Shelton (1915–1984) was a Canadian artist who lived nearly all of her life in Alberta. She worked in a number of mediums but is known for her woodcuts and linocuts.
Information obtained from Ainslie catalogue on the artist.
1915 August 12. Margaret Dorothy Shelton born in Bruce, Alberta (near Edmonton). Shelton's father, Francis Drake Shelton, born in London in 1883, was a graduate of Oxford and was called to the bar in 1906; he came to Canada in 1909. Her mother Agnes Fleetwood Truman, born in 1882 in Nottingham, England came to Canada to teach about 1912. They were married in Edmonton in 1913 and farmed in Bruce and Blackie from 1911 to 1918. After this, a year was spent in Calgary, where Francis practised law.
1919 Family moved to Rosedale, eight kilometres southwest of Drumheller. Francis Shelton practised law.
1922 Attended Rosedale village school.
1929 Ralph Yarwood arrived as head of Rosedale school; he encouraged Shelton in her artwork.
1933 Completed Grade 12.
1933-34 Attended Normal School, Calgary; one-year teachers' art course. Also attended evening art classes at the Alberta Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (P.I.T.A.) with A.C. Leighton. The Royal Drawing Society awarded Shelton honours in portraiture in 1935 and full school certificate with honours in all six divisions in 1936; this represented the full art teachers' certificate.
1934-35 Registered in Fine Arts, P.I.T.A. Scholarship from the Calgary Gas Company.
1935 Attended Banff Summer School taught by A.C. Leighton.
1935-36 Taught at Dorothy, Alberta.
1936-37 Worked intermittently as a substitute teacher, probably Rosedale area and Calgary. There was very little work available. Sold Christmas cards, at times, her only source of income. Took some classes at P.I.T.A. with H.G. Glyde.
1937 Attended Banff Summer School. Shelton had given Lady Tweedsmuir a watercolour painting; in return Lady Tweedsmuir paid part of Shelton's summer tuition. After Banff, there was an exhibition of her paintings in G.F. Anderson's store, Drumheller.
1937-38 Calgary Gas Company's Scholarship for P.I.T.A. Glyde was main teacher.
1938 August. First diary entries indicating production of sets of prints.
1938 20 May. Fine Art Diploma awarded by P.I.T.A.
1938 onwards - regularly exhibited in local exhibitions: Edmonton Fair and Calgary Exhibition and Stampede; won many awards and prizes in most categories and prominently mentioned in reviews.
1938-39 Taught part of the year at Byemoor, Alberta.
1939 Lady Tweedsmuir suggested Shelton submit two watercolours to Eric Brown, National Gallery in Ottawa who forwarded them to the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colours, Toronto; one watercolour exhibited with the society. Shelton's work exhibited at University of Alberta.
1939-40 Registered in Advanced Art P.I.T.A.
1940-41 Calgary Local Council of Women's Scholarship for P.I.T.A.
1941-42 The Calgary Gas Company's Scholarship for P.I.T.A.
1942-43 The T. Eaton Company's Scholarship for P.I.T.A. First printmaking course listed in the 1942-43 prospectus of P.I.T.A.
1941 First known entry in Alberta Society of Artists (ASA) exhibition - a linocut.
1941 To Banff Summer School where W.J. Phillips was teaching. Glyde, Charles Comfort, and others also there that year.
1942 Began to exhibit regularly with the two print societies in Toronto, Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers (CPE), Canadian Society of Graphic Art (CSGA). Wayne Valley (cat. no. 63) was included in the CPE Exhibition Fifty Canadian Prints at National Academy Galleries, New York. Shelton stopped exhibiting with these societies in late 1940s. She sold prints in a Banff craft store.
1942 First recorded entry in Calgary Sketch Club exhibition.
1943-51 Spent winters in Rosedale with her widowed mother and summers traveling and sketching.
1945 To Toronto for six months, (about November 1945 - May 1946), where sister Kathleen was already living. Worked in an advertising agency. She may have attended classes at the Ontario College of Art.
1949 Painted mural for children's ward of Drumheller Municipal Hospital, titled "The House that Jack Built." June, September, December. Prints reproduced in ASA Highlights magazine.
1950 Exhibited Green Valley in Open Show of ASA. June 1950, Approved for Associate Membership of Alberta Society of Artists ASA.
1951 July 28. Married in Calgary to Edner Marcellus from Vulcan. Lived at Chestermere Lake near Calgary. Family home moved from Rosedale to Chestermere. Shelton continued to cut blocks, though fewer to 1958. No further blocks cut till 1970.
1953 On jury for ASA Summer Exhibition.
1962 Moved permanently to Calgary after her husband suffered a stroke in 1961.
1968 Began exhibiting again with the Calgary Sketch Club; only oil paintings exhibited.
1970 Resumed cutting blocks.
1977 Awarded Life Membership in Calgary Sketch Club for her years of dedication to the club and its members.
1979 Husband died.
1981 28 October - 29 November. Exhibition of prints at Burnaby Art Gallery, British Columbia. Five prints Shelton had made in 1947 were reproduced as tailpieces in Joe Wallace Poems published by Progress books, Toronto, 1981
1982 December. Cancer diagnosed.
1984 Major exhibition of prints, Glenbow Museum Calgary.
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.”
Credits: Bio from (Patricia Ainslie, Margaret Shelton: Block Prints 1936-1984 Glenbow Museum, exhibition catalgue, Calgary, Alberta, 1984, p. 8)
