About Leah Beggs
Leah believes in the importance in having a studio, currently she has a small purpose built studio in her garden.” I don’t know how artists work at a kitchen table I’ve always been in the studio, whether it’s the group studio or, at home in the shed.”
Her work is inspired by the landscape, especially the area of Connemara in which she now lives.
” that definitely seeped into my inspiration once I moved to Galway. My work was very structured at the beginning. And it’s definitely become much freer and atmospheric.. it is semi abstract, semi landscape.”
“It’s inspired by the landscape, but it’s not any particular place. And it’s more about..mark making and playing with the paint and, intuitively putting things down and taking things away and seeing how the paint reacts and, using mediums, that kind of thing.”
Leah works intuitively
“I usually let it evolve. I would probably start with a colour in mind. And then the bottom layer would inform that what kind of the top layer colour is going to be. ..I work on so many at one time.. one kind of feeds off the next, I might like an area in one and kind of try and reproduce that in the next one….it is just intuitive. And there’s a lot of happy accidents and how things work out with the paint.”
Leah fits her studio time around her children, “Studio time is school time. When the kids are gone to school, I’d get my walk in with the dog if I can, in the mornings, and then try and knuckle down, but it might only be maybe three mornings a week in the studio. Could do four or five hours. And then, I would need to take a break like every second day because I’m waiting for stuff to dry because it’s oils.”
On titles
“I collect a list of titles on my phone. Sometimes .. during the painting, I’m thinking, okay, I know what that title is going to be, or.. if it is about a particular place, then might put the place name in, but they are definitely getting more and more abstract.”
On rejection
“I hate rejection. I think it’s, it doesn’t kill you. It makes you stronger, right? There’s more rejection than there is acceptance. So I think we just have to roll with it. There’s too many of us looking for things and there’s not enough to go around. But it’s good practice to do it, I think. And you just have to take the rejection on the chin and move on, to the next project.”
On working with Galleries:
“I love working with galleries in that you don’t have to do a lot of the kind of hard administration work, they do that for you. They have their audience.”
On the importance of being professional:
“showing up as a professional artist, I think is really important…you don’t need to be, the artist in the studio that won’t talk to anybody. I think you need to be confident in what you’re doing and be able to talk about your work or, be able to share it…”. Leah also emphasises the importance of presenting work professionally and on time to her galleries.
On increasing the scale of her work:
“I used to only paint to a size that would fit in my car. And then a couple of years ago, I started going bigger. I thought this is ridiculous. Just, pay for a van to bring stuff wherever it needs to go afterwards. So that’s what I do.”
Leah uses a ‘Wandhanger‘ to hang multiple canvases in her studio.
Leah is represented by the Solomon Gallery in Dublin and the Kenny Bookshop and Art Gallery in Galway.
Listen to the full interview on The Warrior Artist Podcast on all major podcast platforms.