About the artist
Margaret Walty was born in Switzerland and lived in Lebanon, Singapore, Algeria and Spain before returning to Geneva to study at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs.
Her early years in sunlit countries gave her a love of light and colour, and her training as a silversmith and jeweller honed her eye for the minute detail she puts into her paintings, which are inspired by myth and fairy tale, and by the landscapes and nature of her mother’s home country in the borderlands of Scotland, where she has lived for the past thirty years.
She has illustrated several books including nursery rhymes, children’s stories by Joan Aiken and by the Brothers Grimm, The Celtic Lunar Zodiac by Helena Paterson, Greenworld by Dougal Dixon ( a science fiction novel published in Japan) and a book on Chinese Tree Peonies.
Margaret has exhibited widely in Britain and abroad, and particularly enjoys taking part in art shows such as those of the World Fantasy Convention, the World Science Fiction Convention, and the yearly British Science Fiction Convention.
For botanical illustration she has been awarded a total of five Silver-Gilt Medals and four Gold Medals by the Royal Horticultural Society and the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society and is a member of the Scottish Society of Botanical Artists.
She paints mostly in acrylics and occasionally in oils, layering the paint in many thin glazes to achieve the intensity of colour and luminosity with which she sees the world. She is increasingly combining the three principal facets of her work, fantasy, nature and botanical, to explore the boundaries between fantasy and reality, seeking to evoke in the viewer the sense of wonder at the world that all of us possess in childhood.