Maggy is a Brit painter. Born a Scouse, raised in Chelsea and a lifelong traveller.
Since 2007, Maggy’s work has been selected and hung regularly in major national exhibitions in the UK and has exhibited in galleries in London, the Cotswolds and the East Midlands. Her work is held in private collections in the UK, South Africa and more recently the US.
But her journey to painting was a long one! Dismissed from art at age six for being messy and not good enough, she was directed to maths and English. And so her career took a very different path. After a university foundation in psychology and law, she served in both the RAF and RN. In time, this led to a high level career in consulting, initially in aviation and then later in transnational law.
She still loved art, but knew she was not allowed to paint - far too messy and not good enough!
However, in the late 1990s, the nigh 40 year ban was lifted. After fracturing several vertebrae in a riding accident, an art tutor in spinal rehab encouraged her to paint. And so, although very hesitant and unsure, she began…
Her daunting programme of consulting continued, regularly commuting across Eastern Europe, but soon a series of small sketchbooks began to invade her briefcase, sitting alongside board papers. These journals offered a private place to record feelings about the highs and lows of her solo travels. Naive and raw, but personal and uncensored, those images remain much treasured.
As she became increasingly hungry to learn and explore, Maggy travelled to paint: to hidden India; to the Gauguin trail and to the deep wilderness of the remote South Pacific; to the hidden rain forests of Guatemala; to Laos and the Burma Railway and to many places far beyond, always seeking the road less travelled and lands and peoples of contrast and difference.
Learning became a passion and she was blessed by support from some well known artists in the UK, including Slade alumna Aussie artist Antonia Black and later, the then President of the Pastel Society, Moira Huntly. Through Moira, Maggy became a member of the highly respected John Blockley Group and for some 15 years, shared travels and experiences with this group of highly experienced and successful painters. Maggy remembers they were very generous and kind, but group crits felt really scary!
Although but a novice, right from the very beginning, her quest was to paint expressively. Not for her the discipline of describing reality of place or form, but somehow a different search - that for a language for the unseen, a metaphor for feeling.
As she was drawn deeper into expressive art, she fell in love with masters such as Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner and the excitement of the painters of the New York School.
But the challenge was daunting – this was the terra incognito with dragons of uncertainty about and the fear of simply unknowing.
Then magic happened and in 2019 she was lucky enough to find a Guide and join an intensive programme on abstract expressionism with a US Mentor, the renowned Dr Nancy Hillis. The first year of study provided a much needed intellectual underpinning to her work, drawing resources from mathematics, philosophy and evolutionary biology.
Since then Maggy has continued to study and work with Dr Nancy Hillis and her partner, Dr Bruce Sawhill and is now an Alumna of their Master Programme on creativity and abstraction – going yet deeper into the terra incognito and beyond into the mysteries of the adjacent possible…where innovation thrives.
Since then, her work has attracted increasing attention from a wider following and she is now working on a series of large commissions. Very exciting and very challenging!
Some stories of her journey are included in a book published in October 2022: The Adjacent Possible Guidebook and Stories of Artistic Transformation by Nancy Hillis and Bruce Sawhill. Her story is also to be included in another book by Janice Mason Stevens, planned for publication in 2023 who also runs travel and teaching programmes – Workshops in Wild Spaces.
