Margaret Egan is an Irish painter and sculptor who specialises in figurative and landscape scenes. An interest in narrative and the importance of storytelling is immediately apparent in her work. Figures tend to glance outward to the viewer, revealing their expression and conveying character. Egan’s landscapes, which have been noted to be Turneresque, similarly use colour and form to evoke an atmosphere. At her flat in Monkstown, she spoke to TN2 about her work, career and where she draws inspiration.
What did your training consist of?
The Breton artist Yan Reigner taught me everything I know and made me look at things in quite a different way. It was a classical training, and we would talk quite a bit about light and shadow and how those things could create an atmosphere or a feeling. But my work is completely different to Yan’s and because it was a very classical training I never really did what I wanted to until he died. Then I did my own interpretation and to me, my later pieces are much more evocative of how you can express feeling. Before that, I got married very young and then my parents wanted me to have a proper job first so I trained as a draughtsman but then decided that’s not what I want to do. With a young family, it is really difficult to paint. I would go out to the clothesline or something and come back in and there would be big brush strokes over the canvas I had done. That was challenging. They weren’t being bold, they were just doing what their mother was. But it wasn’t until after the children left that I could really get to it.
What do you look for when you visit a gallery?
Anything really, anything that is different and not necessarily like what I would do. I remember being over in London and they were doing a retrospective on Matisse and Picasso, and I just love Matisse, every stroke. I don’t like Picasso much, his work was quite harsh. With Matisse like Egon Schiele, you can feel every line. When I was in Australia I saw a huge exhibition on Francis Bacon. You may not have liked him but his work was powerful. My work isn’t like either of them but they prompt a reaction.
Can you tell us about the composition of this work?
That painting there came about from when I was over in the Tate Modern and I was looking out at this big apartment block with no curtains, and you could see people with the lights on doing the most intimate things. I began looking at things through doors and things like that and that is why you have the spaces on each side.
What else informs your paintings?
Things that happen or the places I go. Particularly the West coast of Ireland, I can usually do a show out of a visit. Particularly when I went to Inishmaan, because I could get a mixture of landscape and seascape. I even put the waitress from the little restaurant there in a painting. The girl who was serving us was absolutely gorgeous, tall with dark hair and very Irish but this was just from memory not from photographs. People tend to appear in my paintings but it’s not always as conscious as it was in this case. For me, it’s all about life and how the landscape and people combine. Landscape has a huge impact on how you live and people, in turn, have an impact on it, which is why my shows usually combine both people and landscape.
