Rueben's Ramblings

Fly Away by Margaret Organ-Kean

Artist’s Spotlight: Margaret Organ-Kean

When Margaret Organ-Kean was fifteen years old, a family friend sent her mother a postcard with a Kay Nielsen illustration from East of the Sun, West of the Moon on it. It was love at first sight.

Margaret had always drawn and painted – usually horses – but now her most important goal was to evoke a sense of magic on paper. A year later, she won a major prize in a national poster contest and, encouraged by her high school art teacher, soon began to sell her watercolors at local art fairs.

Her B.A. and subsequent work in art history from the University of Washington opened her to more influences, including (but not limited to) early Renaissance art, Nihonga, Greek sculpture, and much more. She developed an interest in how different cultures viewed a painting. For instance, some would see a painting as a window into a scene, while others considered a painting to be an array of symbols composed on a flat plane. Margaret began to consider formal problems in a painting at this time, such as color, pattern, and composition.

After college, she worked at clerical and computer jobs, and during this time, she started going to science fiction conventions and showing her work in the conventions’ art shows. This led to jobs working for magazines, gaming companies, and book publishers.

Lately, she has spent more time on her own work, especially her more whimsical watercolors of steampunk penguins, flying frogs, and slightly twisted nursery rhymes, and has begun developing an interest in Pop Surrealism.

Her featured piece is called Fly Away, which is based on the nursery rhyme “Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home”. Margaret wondered what a Lady Bug would look like and whimsy did the rest. The piece did move quite a distance from the poem, as wings transformed into skirts and the bugs became women. The masks are actually a recurring theme in her work; and in this instance, she wanted people to wonder what was behind the mask that completely hides the Lady Bug’s face.

You can contact at margaret@organ-kean.com or visit her website