By Rhonda Bartle

Margaret Scott in her well-planned Oakura studio

A backdrop of canvas

Coastal artist Margaret Scott sits in her custom-built studio in Oakura, which includes a light, bright space where she teaches art to willing students, surrounded by blue rock pools and iconic paua shells.

On another wall hangs her new autumn-toned work - a series of luminous beach paintings that catch the mood of the old wreck that rests on rocks in the curve of Timaru Bay.

'The seashore comes from walking.  And the Gairloch.  When I walk, I walk right along to there and it's just amazing how it sits there like a piece of sculpture,' she says.  'These paintings come from that.  These are more technique, experimentation and design and I really enjoy them.'

Three years ago, the Scott family moved from land in Awatuna to a stunning Oakura beach front home, where the artist found herself on a corresponding personal journey from the mountain to the sea.

'When I shifted from the farm to here, I was between two worlds and it was a shift in painting too.'

A wealth of images

As a painter, Scott is often swamped with more ideas than she can handle all at once. 'I've just been down to Christchurch and I haven't painted for two weeks.  I've come back and I don't know where to start.  I have all these ideas popping out of my head!'

She admits to suffering withdrawal when she can't pick up her brush.  'Yes, I do a little bit.  I get grumpy with people.  It's probably like people who play sport.'

Mostly, it's always been like that, particularly when her four children were young.  'Too many ideas!'  A trend in students arriving full of technique and no ideas is something that worries her.  'They say, 'Tell me what to paint.'  And I say but that's the source of what you're doing.  That's the passion.'

A Gift from Bernard Aris

The first painting Scott ever produced was in early high school. 

'I must have had a real need to paint,' she says, 'because I did it in white shoe polish and food colouring.  It was a really good mountain.  I copied it from an early Bernard Aris print.'

Aris, a well-regarded early Taranaki artist, was the reason she took to art.  She tells a fascinating story of Aris ending up as an accidental house guest in her grandparent's home in Okato when her mother was a child.

'He was sitting on a New Plymouth bench in the main street and my grandfather came along and found him there.  He was actually very sick.  It was before I was born.  Grandfather brought him home to Hempton Road and he lived there and did a series of paintings for the family.'

A quiet pastoral scene

One of seven siblings brought up in a rural setting, Scott didn't realise how personally significant her childhood had been until an elderly Māori man asked why every paua shell she painted carried seven breathing holes.

'One for each of us,' she says.  'I didn't even know I had done it.'

Scott understands that her childhood would seem quite foreign to today's generation. Along with all the good times growing up on a Taranaki farm, there was also hardship when her father suffered a terrible tractor accident just before she was born. 

Though no one expected him to live, he did, but his spinal injuries impacted on everyone around him.

A teacher in spirit and training

Scott, who has a background in school teaching, enjoys being able to offer her craft to those who are eager to learn.  'I love the Artists in School Programme, going into schools to talk to the kids.  I really enjoy that.  I think being a teacher means I know how to talk to kids.'

She feels success brings a certain responsibility with it, too.  'One of the most important things in my life is being a teacher because I think that if I have this knowledge, I must give it.  It's part of that cultural belief that I've embraced.  Because I've got this, I must pass it on to others.  Unless you give to other people...I mean, I could die tomorrow and people would wonder, 'How did she do that?'

Making the most of the right brain

Along with private art lessons, Scott also offers workshops on drawing using the right side of the brain.  'I believe in right and left brain function and that you carry an image in your brain.  As a child I had trouble with numbers.  I used to have a veil that came down over my eyes when people talked numbers.  Now I know my right brain is highly developed.  I see creations in my head all the time.'

Scott is able to spot talent in an instant and was recently awed by a young boy who couldn't speak English, who had been put into Art because 'possibly no one knew quite what to do with him.' 

She put a coat over the back of a chair and said, 'Draw that.  I could tell from that one drawing he was brilliant.'

A prized artist

Despite being a leading Taranaki artist whose striking iconic images are recognised everywhere and sell quickly at home and abroad, Scott doubts she'll be taken seriously in the New Zealand art world until she wins a prize.

'I'm a popular regional artist.  That's my role in life.  The cards and prints have made my work quite popular, but it would be neat to win an art award.  It doesn't really matter, but it would be neat to have that happen.'

Scott with a painting commissioned by a Russian wine maker.

A sound artistic future

Though her artistic future seems assured, with ten solo exhibitions, customers coming in off the street and commissions over the Internet from as far afield as Poland and Russia, Margaret Scott never fails to count her blessings.

'I feel quite humble that I've come this far and I've got so much.  Every morning I wake up in this beautiful home.  You travel and you come back to New Zealand to find it's so much better here.  All you have to do is do what you do well and it will all take care of itself.'