Margaret Dorothy Shelton (August 15, 1915 – November 18, 1984) was a Canadian artist and printmaker whose career is closely associated with Alberta. Working across watercolour, oil, pastel, drawing, and printmaking, she is best known for her finely executed woodcut and linocut prints, as well as her sensitive watercolours of the Alberta landscape. Shelton is regarded as an important contributor to the development of Canadian printmaking in the mid-20th century.
Margaret Dorothy Shelton; Banff Springs
Shelton was born on a farm near Bruce, east of Edmonton, Alberta, to English parents and grew up in the Drumheller Valley and the mining town of Rosedale. From an early age she demonstrated strong artistic ability and was actively encouraged by both her parents and teachers. By the age of fourteen, she had already produced accomplished pen-and-ink drawings and paintings, many of which survive. During her high-school years she roamed the surrounding hills and mine works, sketching and painting her immediate environment—an early indication of the direct, unromantic approach to nature that would define her mature work.
Margaret Dorothy Shelton; Mountain Range and River
In 1933–1934 Shelton attended Normal School in Calgary, earning her teaching certificate. At the same time, she enrolled in evening classes at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (PITA), now the Alberta University of the Arts. From 1934 to 1943 she continued her studies at PITA on scholarships, studying under A. C. Leighton, H. G. Glyde, and others. She also studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts, where she was exposed to a broader modernist dialogue. In 1941, Shelton learned Japanese woodblock printmaking techniques from W. J. Phillips, an influence that proved pivotal to her career.
Although Shelton taught school periodically and worked briefly as a commercial artist for an advertising agency in Toronto, she ultimately committed herself to a full-time career as a painter and printmaker. Unlike earlier Canadian landscape painters, including the CPR artists and the Group of Seven, Shelton approached nature directly and without symbolism or romantic exaggeration. Her work focuses on modest, often overlooked subjects—mining towns, barns, valleys, and everyday rural scenes—rendered in a clear, representational style grounded in close observation.
Margaret Dorothy Shelton; Bankview
The late 1930s and 1940s were Shelton’s most productive years. She travelled extensively throughout southern Alberta and into British Columbia, often on foot or bicycle, carrying a sketchbook and paint box. These years produced a substantial body of watercolours and prints that are notable for their economy of line, structural clarity, and quiet emotional restraint.
Personal circumstances limited her artistic output during the 1950s and 1960s. Following her marriage to Edner Marcellus, the death of her mother, the birth of her daughter, and her husband’s subsequent illness, Shelton produced fewer works and ceased printmaking for nearly two decades, supporting her family in part through leather craft. She returned to printmaking and more frequent outdoor painting around 1970, and in her final years, following a cancer diagnosis, turned increasingly to pastel.
Margaret Dorothy Shelton; St Peters, Windermere
Shelton was a member of the Alberta Society of Artists, the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers (CPE), the Canadian Society of Graphic Art (CSGA), and the Calgary Sketch Club. Her work is held in public collections including the National Gallery of Canada and the Glenbow Museum. Major retrospective exhibitions were held at the Burnaby Art Gallery (1981) and the Glenbow Museum (1985), and her work was later included in the exhibition Alberta Mistresses of the Modern: 1935–1975 at the Art Gallery of Alberta in 2012.
Margaret Dorothy Shelton died in Calgary in 1984, leaving a significant legacy as one of Alberta’s most accomplished printmakers and interpreters of the Canadian landscape.