Delighted to be featured on this great website.
healinghamlet.com/healing-through-art/m…

What a great idea for a show. All art is 10x10, unsigned, and $100 each. I love this area of the Methow Valley and this a a gem of a gallery.
http://www.confluencegallery.com

Spellman will be participating in the third annual neighborhood art walk which opens Friday, September 9th from 6-9pm at Madison Park Starbucks. Spellman's work will be featured at Cactus Sept. 9-30th.
www.MadisonParkArtWalk.com

Such an honor to be featured as Max's Kansas City pick for artist of the day on November 8th. Any site that features the likes of Bowie, Patti Smith and Betsy Johnson is definitely one I'm proud to be associated with. Thanks for including me and for sharing my art.

www.maxskansascity.com

I'm always happy to be asked to donate a piece of art to a good cause, in this case Olivier Wever's Whim W'Him auction in October. www.whimwhim.org

Just launched into cyber-space: Check out Inner Idea Artists, a website of abstract artists whose work springs from the soul in the spirit of Wassily Kandinsky.

www.innerideaartists.com

It's always nice to see one of my paintings magically appear somewhere out there.
This was the case when I discovered a painting I started last summer show up on La Conner Art Workshop's blog. Looks better than I remember it; but in the interest of full disclosure, I've painted over the vertical white line at the base of the painting ;) thanks to the insights provided by some of my painting pod members!
See the image here:

http://laconnerartworkshops.blogspot.com/2010/01/peggy-zehring-experimental_23.html

In tough times we all need more art. This new blog launched by pal Robyn of LaConner Art Workshops, is dedicated to the positive power of creative expression.

www.Paintapositivepicture.blogspot.com

Spellman is the featured artist on a great website for mixed media artists. Check it out and share with anyone who is into abstract art.
http://www.layersuponlayers.com/artist-profile-margo-spellman

Big Apple Moment: Margo Spellman had a memorable opening for her artwork at Gallery Montserrate in New York

"The big time"
Seattle’s Margo Spellman still gets a little weak in the knees thinking about her quite successful gallery showing in New York in late September. Spellman, daughter of former Washington Gov. John Spellman, and sister of Kat Spellman, with whom she co-owns public relations firm The Spellman Company, is an artist in her spare time, painting under the guidance of a teacher from Colorado for 10 years. When the opportunity opened for her to show at the established Gallery Montserrat in the Big Apple, she prepared for almost two years, crated up 10 stretched canvas /acrylic paintings, and sent them to New York.

She asked her husband, Bryan Tagas, with Sterling Bank, to fly back with her for moral support.

Turns out she really needed it, because, she says, “My timing couldn’t have been worse. We were there when the Lehman Brothers thing happened, and WaMu’s collapse hit that night.” But people came, and the gallery owner said it was the best such turnout she’d ever had. “Your work is vibrant, emotional and powerful,” she told Spellman.

Friends like Seattle’s Art Mazzola, as well as high school buddies of hers and Kat’s, joined over 100 folks there. Her parents could not go, “but they are wonderfully supportive now. At first they had trouble dealing with (her art) because my work deals with issues of infertility and such. But now they are totally on board, and I got the sweetest email from Dad.”

Her paintings will hang at the gallery for at least a year. Spellman says other galleries are now vying for her work. And she did get a good review in the September/October issue of the esoteric Gallery and Studio magazine. “And I am still in shock,” she says.

Patti Payne, Puget Sound Business Journal

“The Unpredictably Flowering Forms of Margo Spellman”
by Byron Coleman

“Paradoxically, it is often more difficult to hide drawing skill in abstract painting than the lack of it…Still an obviously accomplished draftsperson like the Seattle artist, Margo Spellman must have occasion to struggle against her skill, in order to avoid becoming facile. And one suspects the struggle itself lends Spellman’s work some of its formal tension.

Like the Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky, who also possessed great skill in drawing (as is obvious in his abstractions as in his childhood self-portrait with his mother), Spellman seems to find great inspiration in organic forms in general and in botanical ones in particular..

That Spellman’s paintings are filled with allusions to the natural world lends them to a quality refreshingly unlike the “airlessness” (the only word that will do) of much postmodern abstraction. The connection with nature is a vital one for Spellman, whose forms actually seem to bloom on the canvas like flowers in a garden…Often her compositions are quite baroque as a result of the flowing contours her natural shapes take. And the garden-like effect is furthered by her intrepidness as a colorist, which complements the sensuality of her shapes with a kindred chromatic sensuousness.

For all this, Spellman is too savvy a painter to become overly intoxicated with her subject matter. As Frank O’Hara once said of Helen Frankenthaler, her lyricism is as speculative as it is authoritative…Scrutinizing the juicily worked and reworked surface of Spellman’s triptych “Tools of the Reinvention Trade”, its thickly impastoed forms so pregnant with what came before, one is reminded that the term pentimento means “to repent.”

It would appear, too, that things tend to metamorphose into other things, as Spellman works her surfaces, laying on thick pigments, scraping it away, scumbling one color over another, until what once resembled a soft floral form now takes on a mineral scabrousness; or a shape that may have begun as something else morphs into the semiabstract Pre-Columbian earth mother in Spellman’s “Menopausal Midwife II,” which has a powerful, neo-primitive presence akin to the best works of Rufino Tamayo.

Indeed, while Spellman is primarily an abstract painter in the biomorphic tradition of Gorky and William Baziotes, and most of her compositions capture and hold our attention for her fluent command of form and color alone, certain paintings seem to determine their direction of their own accord. One fine example is “Higher Ground II,” a mysterious verdant landscape with shadowy trees and a seemingly supernatural glow emanating from the sky that calls to mind not only Turner but that odd American visionary Albert Pinkham Ryder. Such anomalies suggest that, like all truly adventurous artists, Margo Spellman likes to keep all of her options open. “