Margaret Saylor

Margaret Saylor paints and draws highly detailed, color-driven, textural botanical paintings. Her work captures the essence of a simple object or plant of our natural world and presents it to the viewer as an exquisite jewel in a setting. She seeks to inform her audience through accurate botanical illustration, a heightened sense of color, and a pinch of imagination.

Margaret earned a BFA in communications design at Kutztown University in 1988. Trained as a graphic designer, Margaret worked for close to 10 years at William Fox Munroe, Inc., a graphic design firm specializing in package design. She returned to the painterly world in a quest for a hands-on, detail-oriented method of depicting the natural world. Her experience as a designer and illustrator have provided a solid foundation for further studies of plant life and botanical art techniques, and Margaret was awarded her Certificate in Botanical Art and Illustration, with distinction, from The New York Botanical Garden in June 2013.

Margaret is a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists, as well as the Philadelphia Society of Botanical Illustrators, and has exhibited with both groups. Born in Reading in 1966, she studied painting first with artists within her own family, then through many classes and workshops. Since January 2012, Margaret has been the editor/designer of The Botanical Artist, the quarterly journal and official publication of the American Society of Botanical Artists. She teaches botanical art in southeastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York, as well as at workshops around the country. Margaret works from her home studio in Mt. Penn.