Meg Holgate is an original, even if her art career began by proving just how convincingly she could become someone else. Holgate, who grew up in New York City and London surrounded by inspiration in some of the world’s best museums, showed an early aptitude for art, but only came into her own style later in life. Before she did, she spent years working as a muralist who frequently copied classic works of great artists for her clients.

“Not many people know this part of my story,” Holgate muses, as she pulls out cards and flyers revealing an astonishing talent for replicating works by artists as diverse as Rousseau, Matisse, Monet, old botanical illustrators, and creators of trompe l’oeil walls painted to resemble bookcases full of classic volumes. Each image is different, each exactingly rendered, and each represents a large-scale painting she executed on a wall in someone’s home in New York, Sun Valley, Idaho or Palm Beach, Florida.

Holgate attended boarding school at age 13 and would come home to London on weekends, heading straight to the Tate Museum. “While I loved the works of the masters, it was the mid-century masters I was drawn to, the Rothkos and Lichtensteins; I was mesmerized by them, possibly the scale, the color, the simplicity. I would just sit in front of these huge paintings,” she remembers, “and I could spend hours just staring at them.” 

Her parents encouraged her artistic leanings, but her father — a banker and a child of the Depression who had wanted to be a photographer — added a dose of practicality when she talked about attending an art school in the U.S. after getting her A levels in England. “So I became a stockbroker,” Holgate laughs. “I just couldn’t stand it. My brain didn’t work that way. There was no beauty in it.”

She found a workaround by learning to do murals. She had a background in art and had studied the techniques of capturing light used by the classic painters, so she was confident. “I love large things,” she says, “and murals are just a grid. Because I had painted by numbers on velvet as a child, I could easily see how to do that.”

While raising three children and navigating a first marriage that did not last, Holgate quietly built a career through word of mouth. More importantly, she created her own long-term experiment in gaining hands-on understanding how great painters handled light. After more than two decades, she was ready to move on.

By then she had relocated to Sun Valley, Idaho, where one unusual commission involved recreating a beloved painting for members of the Hemingway family. She was so good at rendering copies of famous works clients had seen in their travels, it’s hard not to think that had she chosen differently, Holgate might have made an excellent forger. Fortunately, she didn’t.

Her next chapter was opening an antique store in downtown Seattle. She also met her current husband, Bruce, and began thinking seriously about what she wanted to do next. When she was ready to close the store, Bruce asked her a simple question. What did she want to do next? Her response: “I think I want to do my own work.” His follow-up was equally simple: “Where?”

That question led them to La Conner. Holgate says she could think of no other place where she had access to great art, extraordinary light, and a community of like-minded people. That was 11 years ago. Although Seattle galleries quickly picked up her work once she began producing original paintings, she was drawn to the light and artistic community of the Skagit Valley.

Since then, Holgate has immersed herself in painting. The results are ethereal, soothing, dreamy and subtly provocative meditations on the environment and our connection to the earth. “I like large scale pieces,” she says, gesturing around her studio filled with works in progress. “I’m always trying to capture that moment of awe, and it takes me hundreds of layers to achieve what I’m looking for.”

She uses photographs for reference but doesn’t copy them directly. A shape, a flash of light on a cloud, or a single detail might spark a painting, which then unfolds slowly and deliberately — almost like meditation. Oils take time to dry, and it can take months for a painting to reveal what it needs. Some works in her studio feel nearly finished; others are just beginning. Nothing in these works is copied — they are decidedly original and entirely of Holgate’s vision.

“My work is really centered on the environment and the more meditative experience of being, and really reflects the transient and lack of permanence,” she says.

“After she attended a workshop with biologist Merlin Sheldrake, who wrote Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures” she began to ponder a new direction. “I thought about what if I could find a way to express that. I think about, if we are reshaping our world, why wouldn’t the natural world suddenly take over? And what might that look like?”

“It’s the experience of meaning. It’s that thing where your circuitry is changed because you just saw something, and it’s caught, it’s a glimpse. . . it’s a strange way to live,” she says. “I’m curious. I’m fascinated, while being disappointed with other things, but I want to stay in the moment that’s evocative.”

Holgate often collaborates with glass artist Steve Klein and is fascinated by glass, though painting remains her primary medium. Her studio is layered with photographic prints and transparent botanical images she overlays and studies. “I credit my dad with teaching me to see,” she says. “He taught me to really look at things.”

Today, Holgate surrounds herself with art she loves and collects work by artists she admires, recreating the experience of sitting in a museum in quiet awe — except now, much of the work is her own. She also meets monthly with a group of fellow female artists. Together they created Curfuffle, shown at her studio during Art’s Alive! last year, and recently installed at Skagit Valley College, on view at the SVC Art Gallery, located in the Cardinal Center on the Mount Vernon Campus, January 12 through February 28.

To learn more about Holgate and her work, visit megholgate.com. Her studio on 1st Street is not open to the public.

Nancy K. Crowell is the photo editor for La Conner Community News.