Maggie O’Brien

Artist Maggie O'Brien teaches our four-day short course Cornish Landscapes, our online course The Cornish Landscape and the Tresco Painting Holidays.

Maggie O'Brien is a very experienced teacher of short courses having regularly taken painting groups to the Scilly Isles and as far afield as India. Her teaching style is deeply inspiring and based around encouraging exploration, freedom and fun.

Maggie paints the wild and rugged landscape of Penwith and the Scilly Isles. She often draws and paints outdoors returning to the studio to take her works further. Her works are a mixture of place, memory and imagination. Her painting process is an emotionally driven exploration of light, weather and the pattern and rhythm of the seasons.

Maggie uses a variety of techniques and materials and some of the resulting images are more abstract than others. For her painting is a ritual of burial and retrieval and most of the images when they emerge are hard-won.

Maggie also creates project work using text, sound and installation as well as drawing and painting to explore issues such as immigration, personal and collective memory, value and desire. The narrative is often key, as is humour.