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Artist's registry iconography as a lived experience." She is drawn to stark landscapes, and in 2017 she plans to spend time in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts of America painting the red rock country, canyons, and arroyos. "We can't wait to see how it stimulates further exploration in her work," Parker says. "Margaret's paintings have been some of our biggest sellers at Dallas Safari Club and the Safari Club International show in Las Vegas. The reason is you can relate to them. And recently, with her delving more into wildlife, not as main themes but as references of the wild places she is commemorating, demand from collectors has been on the rise." B orn in 1956 in Pretoria, Gradwell came of age at a time when the entire world was watching South Africa cope with the wrenching issues of co-existence, justice, freedom, and stakeholdership in protecting nature for future generations. Gradwell earned a fine arts degree in 1978 from the University of Pretoria, the largest residential university in South Africa. What began the following year as a junior teaching assignment evolved into a 32-year tenure as a professor and, ultimately, her becoming head of the department of fine arts. Many of the country's most distinguished young response to color. Her palette radiates warm earth tones, her compositions excelling with dramatic meldings of earth, sky, and water. It is not uncommon to mistake her scenes for portrayals of the desert Southwest in the U.S. "For travelers who love Africa but who are seeking alternatives to full-framed portrayals of big game animals on their walls, Margaret's paintings stand apart," says Ross Parker, owner of Call of Africa's Native Visions Gallery, based in Naples and Jupiter, Florida, which serves as Gradwell's exclusive U.S. representative. "In the same way Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran painted the American West in the late 19th century, Margaret celebrates the scale and mood of landscapes where humans and animals are not dominant fixtures but set within larger volumes of space. If I had to describe them, I'd call them 'dreamy.'" Parker says Gradwell's work fits as easily inside an adobe home in Santa Fe or Scottsdale as it does in Mediterranean-style villas in California, Florida, or Tuscany. "The aesthetic of rustic, rural Africa is in my blood," Gradwell said. "Warm colors and texture are probably the most prominent visual aspects of Africa. Currently, there is a strong emphasis in local society to become more aware of the uniqueness of African 218 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S W hen Margaret Gradwell debuted a series of paintings in the United States roughly a decade ago, the works by this talented South African impressionist met with an immediate, enthusiastic reception, especially among collectors of wildlife art and western landscapes. It's a curious fact to mention considering Gradwell doesn't identify as an animal painter, nor do her scenes feature wildlife or the American West as prominent focal points between the frame. The magic of her pastoral vision is that it holds universal symbolism, enabling viewers to see their own favorite places on Earth in her brushwork. And yet, for Gradwell, the scenes actually emanate from the ancient homelands of tribal wanderers and habitat, which gave rise to the most iconic wildlife species on earth. "My paintings are all about meditations on the past and the future," she says. Gradwell is no Romantic. Even though she's been inspired by Thomas Cole, a prominent force within the Hudson River School, and Englishmen Thomas Baines (who painted colonial South Africa and Australia), and William Turner, she's not looking to woo the viewer with a sentimental narrative. What she's after is creating a sensuous experience activated by our In Country Tranquility, the artist recreates the scene of a lone zebra grazing by a waterhole while a bank of storm clouds builds on the horizon. Almost all of her landscapes are a blending of both oils and acrylics. Previous pages: Civilization and wilderness collide in Approach, Gradwell's painting of Cape buffalo strolling past an African farm.