Can a painting bring solace and peace to those who look at it? Oil painter and poet Margaret Biggs hopes so. She pours her heart and soul into each of her paintings—usually landscapes, seascapes, or broken floating seashells that are inspired by nature’s beauty but filtered through her own imagination.
“My work is highly stylized, and there’s always a deeper meaning, because that’s how my mind works,” she explained in her studio at the edge of a forest overlooking the Pacific. “I’m constantly thinking, ‘How could I have handled that conflict better?’ or ‘Why am I so concerned about their approval?’ To me it has to do with drawing closer to God or the universal consciousness, so my paintings become that.”
Those paintings will be on display at Edna Contemporary Art Gallery from Feb. 5 to March 5 as part of her Landscapes of My Mind exhibition.
It was a long road to Cambria. Her childhood began in the American South, then college at Louisiana State University, an early career in the fashion industry that allowed her to live in Europe and New York, eventually studying fine art under renowned artist Kerry James Marshall at The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Her influences include mid-century artists Rockwell Kent, Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Edward Hopper. Later, German Expressionism captured her imagination.
Along the way she got married and had two kids and later got divorced.
When she lived in Chicago with her first husband and children, she couldn’t get to places of natural beauty, which she noted have always been healing for her. Because she couldn’t visit the wilderness, she began to paint it.
In Chicago, she was living in an old bank building her husband was renovating. She’d retreat to the basement to paint.
“It gave me inner peace. It gave a calm to me. It gave me a focus. I was painting the peacefulness I was longing to find.”
After the divorce, she moved back home to Pensacola, and she found herself completely bankrupt at 49. She became caregiver to her aging parents until their deaths. Yet, she continued to paint.
“I started doing art festivals, and this woman, she walked into my artist’s tent, my display, and she said, ‘Oh my God, this is like walking into a cathedral,’ and I thought, ‘My goodness,'” Biggs said. “I was trying to paint the healing, the strength, and the inner peace I found in nature, and I realized it was working. It was so fulfilling.”
When she returned to Pensacola, she began painting broken seashells, which became “operating metaphors for middle age. We get beat up and faded by life, but if we work on our inner life, on our thought patterns, on keeping our heart open, realizing everybody just wants a nice life and they’re doing the best they can, being more compassionate and forgiving, and giving ourselves grace, that inner spiral remains intact, but you can’t see it until it’s broken.”
She eventually remarried, and her new husband came out of retirement to take a tech job in Silicon Valley.
“I’d always wanted to go to California,” she explained. After a couple years in the Bay Area and enduring a “severe injury,” they decided it was time to find their forever home.
“We had heard about the Central Coast, and I was ready for some space and a natural environment, natural beauty. Thirty years in major cities was enough,” she said with a laugh as three bucks nibbled grass on the lot next door.
This wild locale was exactly what she’d been searching for.
“I had a different landscape to learn,” she said of her new Cambria environs, noting that some of her landscapes are about “fluidity and interconnectedness,” and the “ups and downs of life.”
What does she hope people will take away from her show?
“The inner strength and beauty that comes with a peaceful heart,” she said quietly. “I want to communicate that. Life is hard, but it’s so beautiful just the same. If we can have the inner strength to not allow ourselves to get discouraged or get beat down, if we learn to recognize when we’re hurt or angry or sad, and to sit with it, recognize it, nurture it, allow it to happen and then allow it to pass.
“I’m a highly spiritual person, and I’ve been through the school of hard knocks a few times. I’m very much into learning to become more even-keeled, in harmony with life no matter what life brings me. All of my work, when I paint it, this spirituality surfaces.”
A poem by Margaret Biggs
I Am a Shell
I am a Shell
A Shell of who I once was,
A Shell of who I will become,
Worn smooth with time.
Beautiful from experience.
Broken yet whole.
Deep in my body,
Singing the song of the Ocean
When I am still and all is quiet
And I listen. Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 9, 2025.