Maggie Matthews
Be still, mixed media on paper, 16 cm x 20 cm, 2014
Drawing Upon Nature, mixed media on canvas, 100 cm x 100 cm, 2015
Ghost Heart, mixed media on canvas, 100 cm x 100 cm, 2015
Growth and Form, mixed media on canvas, 100 cm x 120 cm, 2014
Secret Garden, mixed media on paper, 60 cm x 20 cm, 2014
Spellbound, mixed media on canvas, 60 cm x 60 cm, 2015
Sunshine, mixed media on canvas, 100 cm x 100 cm, 2014
The Wandering Spirit, mixed media on canvas, 100 cm x 100 cm, 2015
Artist Statement
I have always loved nature and spending time outdoors, so it feels only natural to be a landscape artist. I often walk the coastal path—I love the vast expanse of sea and sky. Here, the weather is changeable; the winters are bleak and exposed, while the summers can be warm and dry. The native wildflowers thrive, Bluebells giving way to carpets of Sea Pinks—rich colors and textures I always strive to capture. As I walk, drawn to look at the detail in the landscape, I make close-up sketches of flower petals or seed pods. When I look through the sketch books, I find drawings of shapes and forms, studies of plants set against turquoise seas, or orange lichen shining out through foggy, damp skies.
At home, I surround myself with collections of flowers, leaves, pebbles, and shells—all important finds. I’m fascinated by the patterns in nature: how a single petal is replicated to form the whole flower, the way the sea erodes the sharp edges off a pebble to give it its unique shape.
There is beauty in the order of complex patterns but also a melancholic appeal in the impermanence of all things. With the passage of time, we move through the seasons: cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
About the Artist
Maggie Matthews was born in 1964 in Blaina, a small mining village in South Wales. She studied fine art at Newport College of Art and Design and thereafter took a degree at Exeter College of Art. In 1988, Maggie Matthews moved to West Cornwall, where she lives and works today.
One of Cornwall’s leading abstract painters, Maggie Matthews’s paintings are in the permanent collection of BBC Wales Broadcasting Studio, where they are on view during broadcasts. They also have been featured in Cornwall Today magazine and in the newspapers The Independent and The Cornishman.
Maggie Matthews has exhibited throughout Cornwall and the United Kingdom, including at the Affordable Art Fair, Hampstead, London, as well as in the United States, on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, and in New York City, New York. Her solo exhibition, “Let Nature In,” can be seen July 13, 2016, through August 6, 2016, at Cornwall Contemporary Galleries’ Penzance location.
Cornwall Contemporary Galleries
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