Interestingly, she herself admires the work of such diverse artists as landscape painter JMW Turner “my favourite – there’s a lot of emotion in his work” – and surprisingly Francis Bacon with his distorted, disturbing explorations of the human condition. “I used to think some of his pieces were really cruel and didn’t like them. In a gallery in Australia, I saw a piece of his that I hadn’t seen before and I could not pass it by, it was speaking to me.”

Margaret has made a name for herself and her work over the past 30 years and her exhibitions are eagerly awaited by art aficionados, including her current exhibition The Wonder of the Present, the Possibilities of the Future, at The Solomon Gallery which runs until March 28. It’s a credit to her talent and persistence that while she came relatively late to public attention, after seeing her four children off on their own independent lives, she has built a solid reputation for her work with people variously describing it as mysterious, magnetic and mystical.

However, even while she was rearing her family, painting was a big part of her life and has been since she was a child growing up in Wexford, and one gets the feeling that she always stood out, was always her own person. “I’ve been painting my whole life. I was always scribbling, I loved drawing and writing poetry. I remember writing some stuff at school and the teacher saying ‘Where did you copy this from?’ But I didn’t copy it, it was just me.” For secondary education, she attended school with the Sisters of Mercy nuns – “Merciless, we called them,” she notes with a laugh.

One of four children, Margaret says her parents – traditional Catholics, typical of their generation – were supportive and she got opportunities to do a lot of things, including horse riding. “I love horses, they’re very bright and intelligent, they can pick up feelings.”

She also enjoyed sports, but the competitive element didn’t appeal to her. “I was a very good runner. I remember I’d be winning and people would shout ‘Come on, Margaret, you’re winning,’ and I’d slow down. I don’t see the point in winning when someone just wants to beat you the next time,” she laughs.

The horse riding and sports were casual but the art wasn’t. She says her family tried to nudge her in more conventional directions, but she always knew she was going to be an artist, even though she had to get ‘a proper job’ after school. “Art in those days was not considered a career, you couldn’t make a living from it.”

For a proper job, she actually trained as a draughtsperson, but she says she recoiled at a job in the field. “It wasn’t creative,” and she claims it didn’t help her in her art in any way.

Fortunately for her, she met Yann Renard Goulet, a French sculptor, renowned here back in the 1970s, and later a member of Aosdána, the Irish association of artists. Goulet had an art school in Bray and she studied with him for four years. “He was a great teacher, we had a classical training. Even something like drawing an apple, you’d think, ‘This is stupid’, but he taught us how different it could look, depending on the light, or on the shadows, or the colours you use to paint it. When you’re young, all that is wonderful.”

The Goulet training enabled her to do exams at The National College of Art and Design and she qualified as a teacher and became Goulet’s assistant. “When I qualified, I was pretty good at teaching.”

Margaret married young and she continued for a while as Goulet’s assistant. She also did art classes in her home. The kids were paramount but she didn’t give up her own painting, which she really did for herself in those days. “The dining room was my studio, there would have been an easel up there all the time. I’d be hanging clothes out in the garden and when I’d come back in, the kids would have gotten at the brushes and there would be brushstrokes everywhere,” she smiles at the memory. Her early work was all figurative, but then she let her imagination ‘go with the flow’ and some of her works are more abstract. As the children got older, she started to exhibit in the annual RHA show and she was spotted by different gallery owners, including the Ashford Gallery where she had her first show. Then Suzanne Macdougald of Solomon Fine Art offered her a show and the relationship with the gallery, now in Balfe Street, continues to this day with the current director Tara Murphy. “When you have a gallery, you don’t have to think about doing anything except the work,” Margaret notes. British gallerist Barbara Stanley also exhibited her work regularly. “Barbara saw my work in the Irish embassy in London and contacted me. I’m very lucky in the people that I’ve met.”

She was also commissioned to do several portraits, including that of renowned director Garry Hynes, founder of the Druid Theatre Company. It’s a fantastic likeness, one created after spending a lot of time with her subject. “I sat in on rehearsals to get to know her, you need to be around a person when you’re going to paint them, and I put her sitting on a chair she always used. She very often had an apple in her hand and I used that.”

Like her mentor Goulet, Margaret is also a sculptor and has many of her own pieces in her home, but these days prefers to concentrate on painting. Over the years, she has developed a particular way of working – for example she spent a week in Inis Meáin, just absorbing the landscape, no paints, no sketches. “I love Irish landscape, there’s history in every bit of it.” It was only when she got home that she started sketching and then painting. Unlike a lot of artists, she doesn’t find it useful to take photos. “I find they close you in, I like to have my head free with the feelings I have about the places. The landscape in Inis Meáin is rough and rocky and has huge blowholes. I came away feeling I was in another century, way before civilisation began,” she says. “You feel the history. I have a romantic notion that the land holds energy.” Some of her paintings are figurative like her Gaza works, but many are impressionistic and even semi-abstract. 

She does dozens of sketches for each painting, then starts on the canvas. “I love big paintings. I’ve done mainly big for a while. I was one of the first artists in Ireland to use big canvases.” She paints in her studio next to the kitchen every day, doing longer days in the spring and summer when she can work by natural light. She used to work in oils, but they can be a health hazard and now uses mainly acrylics. “I enjoy acrylics as much as I did oils. I’ve learned to make them as rich as oils,” she notes.

Colour is very important to her work and she uses it to evoke feelings, to create moods and atmosphere, all very subtly done. Mossy greens, burgundies, blues and browns abound and interestingly these are the colours she uses in the decor of her apartment in south county Dublin, which has been Margaret’s home for the last 25 years – it’s the garden apartment of a large period house. “It was a friend of mine who found it. It was a kip of a place when I bought it.” However, she knew that the son of one of her art adult students was an architect – Desmond Barry – and she approached him to help her renovate, which he readily agreed to do. “He worked the whole thing out. It was only when I told a friend he was doing that for me, her reaction made me realise how important he was – he was highly respected in his field for old housing – and how kind he was to restore it with me.”

He suggested taking down the wall between the two reception rooms, which means she has a large welcoming living space. He changed the entrance to the apartment, giving her more space and the original is now a guest bedroom. The original bathroom was very long and Margaret herself came up with the idea of turning it into two bathrooms, one of which is an en-suite for the guest bedroom.

She has a compact kitchen but it’s structured in such a way that suits Margaret, who loves to cook. The recipes of Yotam Assaf Ottolenghi are among her favourites. She loves to have friends around for meals and has a fine-dining mahogany table which she got at auction. Practically all the pieces in the house were bought at auction and they go well with her paintings, the two creating a rich and atmospheric setting. Some of the paintings on the walls are now in the current exhibition. They will probably be snapped up – fortunately, Margaret will be able to create more.

“I want to keep painting til I drop dead,” she says, cheerily. 

‘The Wonder of the Present, the Possibilities of the Future’ exhibition continues at Solomon Fine Art in Dublin until March 28,