Over 80 years ago Margaret Shelton began making art.

Margaret Shelton was a committed artist, best known for her intricate linocut prints as well as her watercolour and oil paintings. With a deep passion for nature and the diversity and beauty of the Alberta landscape and built environment, Shelton’s interpretations are distinctively vital and energetic. Her contributions to the development of printmaking in Canada are significant, having created hundreds of prints in her career. Her works are in collections at the National Gallery (Ottawa), the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Glenbow Museum (Calgary), where the retrospective exhibit Margaret Shelton: Block Prints 1936-1984 took place after her untimely death in 1984. 

She exhibited with the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers (CPE), the Canadian Society of Graphic Art (CSGA), the Alberta Society of Artists (ASA) and the Calgary Sketch Club.

Born 15 August 1915 on a farm near Bruce, east of Edmonton, she grew up in the Drumheller Valley in south-central Alberta. From an early age she began to draw and was encouraged by both parents and teachers.  While attending Normal school (a teacher’s college in Calgary) during 1933-34, she also took evening classes at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (PITA) where she studied drawing and painting with A.C. Leighton, the celebrated English landscape painter. From 1934 to 1943 she attended PITA on scholarships, under the tutelage of Leighton and H.G. Glyde, among others.  In 1941 she learned Japanese wood block printmaking techniques from W.J. Phillips. 

Shelton taught school periodically for a few years and worked as a commercial artist at an advertising agency in Toronto for six months before deciding to commit to full-time painting and printmaking.