Maggie Price excels as lifelong artist

By Annelise Kennedy

Maggie Price is a multi-medium artist who uses acrylic paint on canvas and watercolor
on paper, and she has experimented with paint on wood panel.

Price is a lifelong artist. One could say the drawings she made as a 5-year-old
foreshadowed her development into the artist she is today. If someone were to lay out
Price’s artistic pieces, in order from her first drawings to her latest project, they would
show the many stages of her life.

As a lifelong artist, Price has pieces representing her creativity as a child, books she
read, a poetry phase, her interests and her passions.

Her chosen mediums are those she picked up in different stages of her life. With each
medium, she delivers a variation of her style.
In her canvas paintings, she shows more of a focus on children’s literature and lore.
Among her collection are a mermaid, the Hogwarts castle from the Harry Potter series
and animals with fictitious characteristics, such as a cat made from a plant and a turtle
with a castle sitting on its shell.

She takes advantage of being able to draw in her watercolor pieces by using a
spectrum of weighted lines that she said is common in comic books. A couple of the
overarching themes in her watercolor pieces are endangered species and people’s
portraits.

A piece she is focused on at the moment is her wood panel painting, which she said is
“honestly one of my favorite things I have ever done.” The painting is of an octopus, and
it departs from her animal watercolors through its more unpolished and spontaneous
look.

In a general sense, Price described her influences as “children’s stories more than pop
culture, and nature, but mostly sea creatures.” She shows a particular affinity for octopi,
which she includes with her sea collections. The endangered leafy sea dragon is
another one of her favorites.

Price attributed her development into an artist to some key figures, including her
kindergarten teacher, who told her mother she should keep encouraging Price’s art. She
also credits Bob Jones’ teachers and art program, which Price said is highly developed,
with many levels of art courses and a curriculum that focuses on individual interests and
portfolios rather than a general art education.

Price said she considers her earliest influences to be authors like Tamara Pierce, Peirs
Anthony and, of course, J.K. Rowling – authors who wrote the sort of fantasy that gave
her inspiration. “That was the first time that I’d ever encountered anything where I was
reading and I was inspired to draw,” Price said.

Price said she spent a substantial amount of time finding herself as an artist. “I hopped.
I don’t so much now because I focused, but that’s another thing people don’t know right
off where art is concerned: It takes a long time to know your focus. It took me a long
time,” she said.

Price’s unique style of fantasy presents its own challenge. Price’s style requires that an
she be capable of physically creating the images but also be able to visualize and
transcribe the visual, which Price said “takes a really big push.” She said she did not
automatically have this skill. “I had to teach myself how to be that way.”
Her suggestion accomplishing such a push “is that if you have a drink or two, or if you
let yourself get really tired, or both, and just get out of your own head, it’s much easier.”

“Learning how to be your own artist instead of just being taught how to do things takes
that push of getting outside your own head.”