Meg Buick

Meg’s pieces for Under the Laurels explore the motif of a single figure within a landscape, whether represented by a person, an animal, or a solitary tree. This approach speaks to themes of solitude, simplicity, and the sublime. Her ability to reflect ambivalence—a sense of beauty and loss—is deeply influenced by the environmental crises of our time, making her work both poignant and relevant. We caught up with meg to discover more about her life and influences.

Meg Buick, Under the Boughs, Egg tempera on paper, 50 x 70 cm, 2024

Meg, Your work often reflects a balance between beauty and a sense of unease, particularly in your portrayal of the ‘natural world’. How does this duality come through in your pieces for the Under the Laurels exhibition?

 Meg- It’s not something I set out to explore in my paintings, but I think it emerges. It’s impossible for anyone who is following the mass scale destruction of the environment to look at the so called 'natural world' without some sense of loss. But it’s also a huge source of beauty inspiration and solace, and I think the ambivalence I feel comes across in the work. All of these pieces explore the motif of figure in landscape - I think I’ve always been interested in the motif of the single figure, sometimes with something standing in for the figure - another conscious being like a bird or a horse - or sometimes a different singular motif like a tree or a house. The single figure could be seen as lonely, or isolated but I think I’m more drawn to its potential to suggest solitude, simplicity, or an experience of the sublime. 

You’ve experimented with various media, from painting to etching and lithography. Can you tell us more about the techniques you use and how they come into play?

  Meg- really happy to just tack between materials, I think they all feed into each other. I’m a painter really, and when I go into printmaking I can tell that I lack some of the basic patience and attention to process that makes for a very good technical printmaker, but I get so hooked on the end result that I stick it out for a while , and eventually give in to it, and it teaches me to be a more patient and virtuous maker! Then suddenly I get fed up and go back to painting, but the marks and quality of the prints inform the painting process. 

At the moment I work a lot with monotype and egg tempera, using them as a ‘ground’ for pastel and pencil and oil paint and other mediums. As well as the practical advantage of fast drying times and low toxicity, I am interested in Nancy Spero’s rejection of oil paint as the male, canonical medium, too heavy with the patriarchal history of painting. I am also interested in the historical significance of egg tempera, as one of the earliest painting materials, and the way in which the material itself can connect the works to the ancient origins of painting. 

Meg Buick in the studio

Your images are sometimes described as ‘ghostly’ or ‘fragmentary.’ How does this style of partial revelation or obscurity tie into the broader themes of the Under the Laurels exhibition?

  Meg- thing I find interesting about Carrington’s work is how varied it is. She doesn’t seem to have settled on a particular style or subject in the way that the art market generally favours and rewards. I think I read that she stopped signing her pictures at some point, which could imply that she freed herself from the need of external validation - I don’t know enough about her to know if that is true and I don’t want to romanticise her life - it sounds like she was fairly unhappy and it wasn’t an easy time to be a woman. But that kind of rejection of convention seems connected in a way to the rejection of the art world pressure to produce a very logical, coherent body of work . She could paint in a kind of classical realist style but chose to work with glass and silver foil, she seemed willing to let go of some of her training, and that’s interesting to me. 

My work is probably fragmentary, I don’t want it to have an obvious narrative, but to remain connected, more like a series of stanzas in a poem. So I am very interested in this element of her work, the separated moments and connections between things, without trying to pin everything to the same narrative arch. 

Meg Buick,The Crossing, Monotype and pastel on paper, 50 x 70 cm, 2023