Margaret R. Thompson is a painter living and working in a remote region south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She earned her Bachelors of Arts in International Studies and Visual Arts at Eckerd College with a concentration in Latin American and socio-cultural anthropology. Filtering reality through her own mythology, she weaves responses to books and music, explorations of personal ritual and symbolism, and a reverence to the natural world into small to large paintings. Margaret's paintings of figures, animals, moons, candlelight, and shrines act out a magical reality the artist senses intuitively. Humans fly. Horses dance. The sun is a monastic observer of the landscape. Shells, flowers, fruits, wild reeds, and matches litter the ground. Shrines erupt with water, plants, and fire. Working closely to the Earth and often painting outside, Margaret infuses her oil paintings with wax, sand, soil, mica, ash, spices, and plant oils to radiate the essence of the land. The raw materials she collects and rubs into her paintings evoke an environmental intimacy. Margaret's smaller abstract works bloom from vision drawings conjured by the surreal American Southwest landscape where she lives. Akin to the desert transcendentalists, most notably Agnes Pelton, she paints her responses to the light, head, starscapes, earth formations, and the flow of river waters and wind she observes in her high desert home. Each painting she makes is both a joy and meditation on the possibilities of our shared existence. Margaret's works beckon viewers in, encouraging curiosity and belonging. They open doors to seeing what is behind the obvious, what could be in a world where mystery and awe are sacred. Margaret's paintings have been exhibited with My Pet Ram Gallery (Santa Barbara, CA and NYC), Smoke the Moon Gallery and Title Gallery (Santa Fe, NM), Arusha Gallery (Edinburgh, London, Bruton, UK), Red Arrow Gallery (Nashville, TN), Visionary Art Projects (NYC), Wilder Gallery (London, UK), Duran Mashaal Gallery (Montreal, QB), Gallery II (Tel Aviv, Israel), Tyger Tyger Gallery (Ashville, NC), and Art Athina (Athens, Greece), with upcoming shows in Mexico City with Red Arrow at Zona Maco Contemporary Art Fair, and Edinburgh, UK with Arusha Gallery.