Artist Spotlight: Margaret Kilgallen

I have to admit that I have been looking forward to writing about Margaret Kilagallen since the last time I wrote an artist spotlight. This is one of my favorite artists for more than just the fact that I like her art. I think that the kind of person that she was and the things that she stood for and what she believed in, really made me love her.



For those of you that have never herd of her, I suggest you check her out online or you can watch the movie "Beautiful Losers" (One of my favorite movies) to learn about her and other brilliant artists. Margaret was a bay area street artist in the 90s and she had a heart breaking death in 2001. Her art was mainly of these powerful women in nature, she did a lot of work for her community such as making signs and working with calligraphy which was really prevalent in her body of art work as a whole. One of my most favorite things that she said was:

"In my own work I do everything by hand, I don't project. I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, but my hand will always be imperfect, because it's human. If I am doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line, and over the line trying to make it straight, I'll will never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up you can always see the line waver and I think thats where the beauty is."

There is so much truth to that statement. As artist we are always trying to make something look perfect but no matter how hard we try we will never be able to get it to that state because humans are imperfect. Art that is done by computers can be perfect but it is 100 times more beautiful to see something done by hand because you can see how much work went into each little line. She also spoke a lot about women's rights and equality which also made a big impression on her work.


,br> Margaret Kilgallen died in 2001 from cancer. She chose to not get treatment because she was pregnant and she would have had to give up her baby which she was not willing to do. She was married to another really talented artist named Barry Mcgee (he is really talented and awesome) and they did a lot of collaborations with each other. She died very young and it is such a shame because she was really talented and a wonderful human being who had the most interesting things to say. She is a huge inspiration to me not only as an artist but as a human being. She continues to inspire young women artists everywhere.