Marge Rector

Marge Rector knew from early childhood that she wanted to be an artist. Throughout her school years she worked on mastering the skills of drawing and painting. In 1950 she graduated from Texas Technological University in Lubbock, Texas with a degree in commercial art in one hand and a marriage certificate to her childhood sweetheart Floyd in the other.

They settled in Dallas, Texas where Floyd started medical school and Marge worked for Bozell and Jacobs Advertising. After the birth of the first of her three daughters she worked from home as a freelance commercial artist.

In 1958 after completing his training Floyd joined the faculty of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. This enabled Marge to move into the less financially secure area of fine arts. Chapman Kelley Art Gallery asked to handle her work, a relationship that lasted 15 years. This began a long string of one-woman shows, group shows and competitive art shows. During this period prominent collectors in the Dallas/Ft Worth area acquired a number of her paintings. In 1973 Floyd accepted a faculty position at the University of California San Francisco medical school. They settled in Sausalito, where they still live, and Marge rented a studio in the Industrial Center Building.

In 1979 they broke ground in Woodacre for Marge’s studio, designed by longtime friend and architect Gary Kneeland. The building of the studio, which was a family/friends affair, was completed in 1982. The wonderful environment of the studio has stimulated Marge to further creativity and productivity as an artist. Since completion of the studio she has participated in the annual Marin Open Studios, as well competitive art shows. Over her long career as an artist Marge has created 364 paintings and over 2000 drawings, and has participated in 166 art shows. Floyd, now in retirement has become expert in making prints from Marge’s drawings.

My goal as an artist is to express my thoughts in a concrete way, whether by drawing, painting or sculpting. I love the process of creating a work of art - the feel of pencil or pen, the application of paint, the stretching ofcanvas, and the technical decisions to be made. For me, ideas for paintings arise in profusion. From my earliest paintings I have been interested in using the tension between lines and shapes to create different moods and impressions.

I may use sharp angular lines and shapes in one painting and curvilinear in another. In some paintings lines and shapes are drawn with instruments, while in others they are drawn freehand. I have used floating forms, reflections, shapes and shadows, flatness, depth, color relationships, and negative and positive shapes to achieve the different moods. I have experimented with adding movement by the use of two superimposed canvases with cutouts in the top layer. When placed on a well-lighted wall, the shadows created by the cutout sections move as the viewer moves.

The current paintings combine free flow with hard edge images and explore the interactions of color, line and shape. A recent group of paintings explores the effect of salt on liquid paint. The salt dissolves and recrystallizes – large crystals form where the paint was more liquid and smaller crystals form where the paint was less liquid. This creates an interesting texture with a subtle sparkle.