I would like to holiday in an artistic quantum reality where beauty and truth are visible. I’ve almost been there before. It sits close-by and offers only the quickest glimpse, before it disappears. I see and then forget – light, colour, wind, moon – arranged with purity. Part of me would like to return to these moments but words are too crude to remember such things. Paint, however, can retingle these parts of the brain. Colour has intense emotive power, and more so when it is next to another. The possibilities of painting are endless when shape is introduced too. I drive past trees leafed with the first green flush of spring to see Maggie New, and I am greeted with a cup of tea and my first sight of her latest work.
We head upstairs to her studio, past four paintings with deliberately muted palettes. The effect, without the mix of warm and cool colours to recede and bring forward the eye, and with a focus on shape rather than perspective, makes me concentrate on one plane, and this moves the painting somehow onwards to another. The artist has scraped into the surface in some places. Focusing on two dimensions has brought these paintings into an entirely new one.
At the top of the stairs are paintings with moons in them. I jest that other artists claim ownership over the moon. They can be possessive of it. It brings an otherworldly quality to a painting. Maybe, the moon helps restrict the palette too. Spring, autumn, winter, night or day – we live in a world that rarely stays still and these diurnal and seasonal movements are an artistic another obsession with many artists. Maggie New brings me back to earth and reminds me sometimes it’s just the shape, the circle, that is needed. A sphere introduced into a rectangular canvas is potent. It brings another dimension to the painting – geometrically as well as emotionally.
Some paintings Maggie tells me are her safe place. When colours and symbols become familiar to an artist, they can be placed around a painting to create the sought-after effect. Maggie New has been in this studio, or walking and looking at the seas and mountains of the north for many years. She takes no photographs or notes, and studio-time is spent looking for the essence of her subject without being tied to the specifics. A story must be told in one rectangular space and she is very very good at this. I look at more work and feel a moment of awe in Night Light and the balmy heat of summer in Ochre Light. It is the combination of shape and colour that create Maggie New’s painted poetics, and it takes many years’ practice to achieve this, so long that New’s tubes of paints are familiars, part of the way she sees the world.
She introduces me to her colours. Lemon yellow is subtly different to spectrum yellow and there is Indian yellow too. She shows me how these work in a painting. The effect is magical. They don’t merely represent an object, but lead the eye in-and-out and from left to right. The tubes of ultramarine blue and cerulean blue are similarly squeezed and near the top of Maggie New’s paintbox.
There are also always works in Maggie’s studio that are more experimental. They take her out of the comfortable landscape zone and into worlds of compositional exploration. They keep everything fresh. Outside, the first warm sun of spring is transforming the world, and inside, this is evident in New’s excited green paintings. A twisting and surging of painted growth pulls my eye in, and I know how hard it is to achieve this. Very few artists can paint green paintings without them looking somehow false. There are no horizons in these works. Almost to reset the ocular palette, Maggie New works on warm paintings at the same time and ones that, like on her staircase of are more two dimensional (but somehow opening a third one.) I love these works.
There is nothing complacent in this studio. The energy here is one of play and exploration, and this is a serious game. Maggie New has mastered the nuances of paint so well that she can hold that moment in her mind’s eye, the seen glimpse, without distraction. This is what all artists seek to achieve. It takes a meditative state - practice, time and understanding, but if achieved, as Maggie New does, we too can holiday there.
