Margaret Devitt

After graduating from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, Margaret started and ran a mohair weaving workshop in Lesotho for six years. In 1971 she moved to London where she studied under Cecil Collins as well as attending life drawing at the Royal College of Art and The Prince’s Trust. From 2008 she has been studying with Robin Child at his Art Research Centre in Devon.

Margaret has accompanied her husband on his many trips to different parts of Africa, where she painted and drew the African landscape and people. This culminated in a series of desert landscapes which were exhibited in Guildford and London.

Margaret’s work is about finding and exploring, not about representation. She believes that a drawing or painting expresses a reality that is not a simple reproduction of the person, object or landscape in front of one. It becomes a translation into something other than the original source of inspiration, but hopefully at the same time is suggestive of the original. It will often have abstract qualities that are found in so-called reality. It was Morandi who once said “nothing is as abstract as reality”.

Margaret Devitt Artist