Marcee Musgrove Creates Art on the Move

After leaving Michigan at age 18, new Anderson Artists Guild member Marcee Musgrove moved 25 times before arriving in Taylors, S.C., earlier this year. She has lived across the U.S., from New York to Arkansas to Atlanta but has a connection to Anderson, where her parents had retired, and to Clemson, where she and her husband were married in the botanical garden. Most of the moves were for his work as an electrical engineer.

Throughout the relocations, Musgrove raised a family and had various jobs. She worked for a travel agency, two different VA hospitals, and the Census Bureau, among many other stops. Most of the positions involved medical administration, making reports, or advertising and marketing, and she had to give up the majority after just a year to move again. Her favorite work was selling real estate. “I loved it and was good at it,” she said.

She took a lot of art classes over the years, learning how to create wearable art of dyed silk, to weave, and to paint in both oils and acrylics. She sold her art in cooperative galleries and was especially successful doing so in Savannah.

Her favorite artists are Monet, Kandinsky, and Chagall. “I love when you look at art and feel something,” she said. Because of a sensitivity to the chemicals in oils, she works primarily in acrylics now, creating what she calls impressionist abstractions. Her approach is to lay out a basic composition with acrylics. “Then I let go of that and do whatever feels right,” she said. Each painting ends up with nine to twelve layers on it, and she has up to 50 paintings going at all times. “If I obsess about a painting and want to finish, that will cheat it,” she explains.

She’s currently hunting for galleries near her new home while enjoying the creative process. “It took me so long to allow myself to be an artist,” she said. “I always wanted that as a profession but felt like I had to be practical. The gratitude I have is great.”

For more information about Musgrove, visit https://marceemusgrove.art.