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For the past 25 years I have had a career both as a Psychotherapist and a Landscape Painter.

One feeds the other, and both are informed by Process Oriented Psychology.

My paintings are most successful when I respond to an impulse or energy from the environment or landscape, which occurs at the beginning of the painting. In Process Work terms this is a "flirt" containing energy and relationship potential, so that my response forms part of a relationship with the landscape and is continued during the painting. This is often similar to the work with clients in therapy. So, the painting becomes something initiated and continued by the landscape, dreamt up by signals and response into an abstract expression of colour and musical rhythms.

Connemara

Birling Gap Summer

Margaret’s paintings originate in a variety of geographical locations. The common theme is water.

There are glimpses of the South Downs, especially in the area of the Seven Sisters, as well as local haunts around the river Leam in Leamington Spa and Chesterton.

The work has been shown in exhibitions in Oxford, the South Coast and around Warwickshire, including solo exhibitions.

Birling Gap

	" More than merely recording a place, the paintings register a history of experienced moods, giving a palimpsest of such moments which the artists technique itself powerfully reinforces. Repeated observations of the landscape recorded in sketches, watercolour and photographs are then worked up in the studio through the building up of layers which allow form gradually to emerge from a chaos of colour. Each painting thus becomes a distillation of many encounters, the more intense for their multiplicity and variety. The landscape - and particularly the water in it - reflects back the painters many acts of observation in a condensed moment of reciprocal looking which results in an arresting absence , or at least reticence, of self. Eavesdropping on this mutual encounter, the viewer is, in turn drawn into the mutual gaze of observer and observed with a force that is indeed worthy of the title meditation"
	Catherine Bates