MARGARET MOUSSEAU

First published: March 2026

Vermont artist Margaret Mousseau lets the stories of her past flow out of her through unearthly, twisted, vine-like strokes of colour

Winding lines in vivid coloured pencil connect figures, forms and curious creatures in the drawings of US artist Margaret Mousseau. Each work is layered with pattern and detail that draw a viewer in to notice things entwined in the scene, like the tendril of some otherworldly flora or the multicoloured body of a bird. Her spontaneous style gives the feeling that these drawings are still transforming as she responds to both joyful and haunting experiences of the past and present. “My way to deal is to try and draw a feeling,” explains Mousseau. “It flows from me to the paper, and maybe that’s the end, or maybe I continue and draw more, draw what the image is telling me. I often have an idea from personal experiences, the news or other situations.”

COVID-19 Psycosis [sic], 2020, 14.5 x 12.5 in. / 36 x 31 cm

Born in Rhode Island in 1955, Mousseau worked from 1977 to 1999 as an X-ray technician in a hospital while raising two boys. It wasn’t until after she retired in 2016, when she was in her early sixties, that she took up art at the encouragement of her younger son. “My son had this idea that I should draw to help process some of my emotional traumas and situations from childhood,” she says. “I told him I cannot draw, but he sent me paper, pencils and art books. I thought you had to go to art school to be an artist. I guess he knew I had a story to let out, and eventually I did start to draw my feelings.”

Crucifixion, 1992, oil on canvas, 39.5 x 29.5 in. / 100 x 75 cm

Her medical career, with its process of looking within and revealing what is hidden, now lends a penetrating perspective to the art that Mousseau makes in her Vermont home. For hours each day, she draws on surfaces such as found pieces of wood and scraps of cardboard, the asymmetrical shapes giving her cathartic work, populated with elongated animals and unearthly vines, a further sense of the fantastic. She used her earliest pieces to respond to her experience as a teenager when she was forced to give up a baby for adoption, with images of an infant in a basket floating downstream – just out of reach of mother figures hovering above – regularly appearing.