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Megan was delivered by her father at home on the Ft Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana but her roots are Appalachian.   Her family settled in Winchester Virginia in 1984 and the Shenandoah Valley became her stomping ground.  Her love for drawing was recognized and nurtured from an early age.  She studied painting and art education with an emphasis in oil painting at Hendrix College outside of Little Rock.  She worked as an art teacher at Powhatan school and then as an instructor at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley.  She left teaching full time to raise young children, but continued to paint.   In 2016, she moved deep into the forest to her current home and studio, Sweetrock.   Here, she works full time as a painter while also raising her four children and a menagerie of animals.  She continues her education working with other professional painters and also teaches workshops at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley.  Megan has a strong foundation in drawing and a masterful understanding of color.   She paints with oil in a mostly classical style, working in layers.  She works en plein air, from life and from reference in the studio.  Along with landscapes,  she paints portraits of both people and animals.

 

Statement: This region, our home, is so rich with natural beauty.  It's when light, color and motion enliven these familiar landscapes that they are crystallized in our perception and memory, and become immediate - nostalgic- symbols of and for our home.  Each of these moments has a different mood, and all are beautiful.  As a body of work, these paintings aim to approach a complete idea of this landscape, not just its physical presence with us but also its spirit and our tension with and against it.  I am particularly inspired by the relationship between water and sky and the Shenandoah river gives this to me daily. 

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To take the time to behold the energy within the subject is to tap into something very magical, and I work to capture that.