Margo Maeckelberghe nee Margaret Oates Try (11 August 1932 – 10 January 2014) was a Cornish Bard and artist.
Biography
Maeckelberghe was born in Penzance, where she grew up and lived for most of her life. She studied at the Penzance School of Art, and the Bath Academy of Art from 1949 to 1952. She returned to Cornwall after spending two years teaching in London and Gibraltar. Maeckelberghe was best known for her dramatic contemporary landscapes and seascapes in oil.Peta-Jane Field, "Margo Maeckelberghe and Rose Hilton: Two Penwith painters" ArtCornwall.org (2008). For many years her studio was at "Carn Cottage" at the top of the moors between Penzance and Zennor. "For me, the coasts, seas, moors, skies and rocks of Cornwall offer inexhaustible painting material," she told an interviewer in 2008. In 1963 she organized the first show of Belgian artists in West Cornwall, at the Newlyn Art Gallery in Penzance.Melissa Hardie, 100 Years of Newlyn: Diary of a Gallery (Hypatia Publications 1995): 1962. In the 1990s she was elected Chair of the Penwith Society of Artists and was elected a Cornish Bard in 1997. In 2008, "Extended Landscape," a major exhibition of her works, opened at Tate St. Ives.Angie McDonald, "Notes for Teachers: Margo Maeckelberghe, 'Extended Landscape'" (Tate St. Ives 2008).
Personal life Margo Oates Try married a Belgian-born doctor, Willy Maeckelberghe. They had two children, a son Paul and daughter Nico. Widowed in 2007, she died in 2014, aged 81 years.
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