During the first lockdown, Margaret Rattigan’s husband came home with an easel, a few paints and an art set from Aldi. She was working in the pharmacy sector at the time, so she was going out to work every day while the news came out of China and Italy and nobody yet knew what they were dealing with. She was frightened, she says, the same as everybody.

She started following YouTube tutorials. Not with any plan attached to it. Mostly because it was the one thing that put her head somewhere else for an hour.

Then she painted a tree, and it looked like a tree. She has not really stopped since.

Manchester, Leitrim, London

Margaret was born in Manchester and the family came back to Ireland in the early seventies, to Leitrim, where she was reared and went to school outside Ballinamore. In her early twenties she went to London, as she puts it, like lots of people back in the eighties, and stayed fifteen years. She built a corporate career there and transferred back to Ireland on the strength of it, to Limerick first, about twenty years ago, and then back up to the northwest, which is the part of the country she calls home. She works in Sligo still.

Boyle was a practical decision before it was anything else. It sits halfway between her parents in Ballinamore and her work in Sligo. She had always wanted to live beside the sea, and says she still would, but she settled for a lake.

Something out of a fairy tale

The lake is Lough Key, and it is not much of a compromise. The first time she saw it she was a small child, coming back down from the hospital in Sligo, and the car stopped off at the forest park. She had never seen anything like the castle and the island, and she says she thought it was something out of a fairy tale.

She went back in her late teens with friends on days off, when the tunnels were still open and you could get down into them. She still calls it a magical space. It is now the biggest single thing in her work. She thinks she has painted it three times, and hedges the number in case that is wrong.

No art in the schools

One of nine at home, seven girls and two boys, and there was always somebody in the house making something. Her mother knits and crochets and there is art on her mother’s side of the family. An older sister paints, and was the biggest influence on her growing up.

The problem was the school. There was no art taught in it, and not much of it around Ballinamore at the time either, though she is careful to say that has changed. Art college was the dream and it did not happen. What she did instead was draw.

“I probably spent most of my time in classes that I didn’t like, like maths and Irish. And those classes, I would’ve been drawing and sketching my classmates.”

Then England, then the career, and thirty odd years in which the pencils were never far away and the painting never started. She is not bitter about any of it. What she says now is that after all those years in the corporate sector she feels like she is doing what she always wanted to do.

Doing the whole thing in reverse

After the tutorials came an online oil painting class run by Paula McGowan up in Sligo, which she credits with the habits and the technique. After that it was practice.

What happened next is unusual enough to be worth spelling out. Most artists come up through galleries and find the online end of it strange and late. Margaret went the other way. She would never have approached a gallery at the start and says she would not have known how. Doing it all in reverse, is how she puts it.

The push came from her younger sister Paula, who had got fed up being handed free paintings every time she saw her and told her to sell them instead. Then spent an entire day texting to ask had she put the post up yet. When it went up on the Shop in Ireland page, four or five small paintings sold off the one post, and she says she could not believe people would buy her work at all.

Blow in

She and her husband moved to Boyle not long before the lockdowns, so they knew almost nobody, and then nobody was meeting anybody for two years. The art is what fixed that. The craft shop in town took her work when she had no idea how to ask for it, and Anna, who was working there at the time, was the first person she spoke to about putting anything in. She does the Courtyard Market. She and her husband are in the little cafe next door at least once a week, which she admits they should cut back on.

She uses the word blow in about herself more than once, and she does not make a complaint out of it.

“Even if I am a blow in, they’re still being very welcoming and very friendly.”

During the Boyle Arts Festival she had work in two shop windows, McGee’s and a pharmacy on the main street, with the watercolours in one and the florals and vintage pieces in the other, chosen to sit against each window’s own colours. She sold one out of McGee’s and two out of the pharmacy.

The morning the swans came across

She also had a painting in the open exhibition, and it came from a video. Last November, on a still, hard frosted, completely clear morning, Florence set an alarm and went out to Lough Key at first light. The lake was like glass. The swans came across in front of the castle, unasked, and one of them put its wings up. She put the video on Facebook that evening with music on it, and the same night got a text from Margaret asking could she use it.

The painting that came out of it combined a few images to get what she wanted, the castle and the swans together, and it went into the festival’s open exhibition.

The other Lough Key pieces came from a photograph by Dan, a local man who takes his boat out and whose knowledge of the lake Florence describes as phenomenal, and from one of Margaret’s own photographs turned into a night scene with a full moon. There is a Gaelic Chieftain. And there is a cherry blossom tree on the Carrick Road she photographed in June and did not paint until two months later, so she had to put the blossom back on it from memory. That one is a favourite, and the reason is that it is nothing famous at all. Just a tree at an angle into a field that caught her eye.

She has an idea for a series of those, and came up with the title while the recording was running. Hidden gems. Not the landmarks, the places that mean something to somebody.

Ava and the marketing manager

There are ten nieces and nephews, and two of them come up. Ava is nearly six and Margaret calls her her muse. When they are together it is drawing and painting the whole time, and the last visit ended with Ava set up at a table beside her making her own jewellery out of materials safe for a five year old. There are a lot of illustrations with Ava in them.

Ryan is twelve and works the craft fairs with her. She calls him her marketing manager, on the basis that he is soaking up everything about retail and selling, and she has a commercial background to teach him from. He was with her at a fair in Ballyconnell the week before the recording.

Part time, and the time it buys

Margaret mentions in passing that she had a period of illness last year and is thankfully back at work now, part time. She does not go into it. What she says about the part time is that it helps her health, and that it gives her the room to focus on the art.

On AI

Florence raises AI as a threat to creative work and Margaret takes the opposite position, and holds it. Her view is that AI makes real art more valuable, not less. She thinks AI images are still fairly obvious and accepts they will get less so. The point she keeps coming back to is the surface of a painting.

“They will never replicate the hard work that goes into a painting.”

She is not against using it either. She says she is producing a set of Christmas cards using a program with her own artwork put into it, and that for cards it complements what she does. It is the painting itself she does not think it can touch.

Why people buy it

Asked what she hopes people get from her work, she splits it in two, and stresses it is her own view rather than an artistic one. People buy art either for how it makes them feel or because it suits the room. She is relaxed about the second. The first is the one that gets her.

There was a commission this year for an old school friend from Ballinamore, a simple cherry blossom, and it was a repeat. The original had been one of the first paintings Margaret ever did, from a tutorial, and one of the first where the tree looked like a tree. She had given it away. It triggered a memory in the friend, who messaged her that night, and who asked for it again nearly three years later because she had never forgotten it.

“I know when the painting is finished because I get a feeling when it’s finished.”

The sea, and not being able to swim

Seascapes are the other half of the work. She loves the ocean, cannot swim, and says at her age she really should be able to. Strandhill is the main one, for the strength of the sea and the lighthouse off in the distance. There is a beach in Kerry she painted from a photograph taken twenty years ago and dug out again recently.

The advice

It takes her about twenty seconds and there is nothing decorative in it. Do the practice. Do not give up. When she started, she says, the paintings looked like a five year old had done them and she nearly went back to sketching for good. There are classes everywhere now that were not there when she was young, including the Leitrim School of Art in Drumshanbo, and she would like to see something like it in Boyle.

Then the commercial part, which most people leave out. If you want to sell, think about how the work is presented and how you present yourself online, and do not be afraid to do it. The hardest thing, she says, is putting up that first post and walking into the first shop to ask.

“You’ll find your tribe. You’ll find the people that like your work.”

She is on the committee at Solas Art Gallery in Ballinamore, near where she went to school, and has an application in for a solo show there. She is doing a business development course one day a week. She has ventured onto TikTok, though she is quick to say she is not doing any mad dances on it. She makes art jewellery out of miniaturised prints of her own paintings with small bits of gold leaf on them, because she likes to fiddle with small things.

She said the line herself, twice, about it never being too late.

“It’s never too late, so why not? The time will pass anyway.”

Margaret Standing Beside Her Collection of Art in the Leitrim Design House