Margie Tate
"Spring Creek: Bronze Light"; 2018, oil on canvas, 16"x20".
Sponsored by Tangipahoa Parish Tourism
“I’m kind of a fair-weather plein air painter,” laughed Margie Tate. The celebrated central Louisiana landscape artist was speaking from the studio in her home, which stands on a wooded hilltop near McNary, about twenty-four miles south of Alexandria. The studio is Tate’s fall-back position, to which she retreats when the weather proves uncooperative for painting out-of-doors. “Once you start painting from life, you’re just not satisfied with [painting from] the photo,” she observed. “Painting from life, you can move a little to one side or the other—to see around that tree—to get the perspective just right. And you have to get in there and capture what you see then fill in the detail later. I try to get the scene and the light as I see it in the first thirty minutes or so. I feel like that makes the painting more alive.”
The paintings that Tate makes of the Cenla landscape around her are also informed by memories from her childhood; she grew up roaming the woods, fields, and creeks around McNary. Especially significant in her art, and her life, is Spring Creek: a pretty, meandering, sandy-bottomed stream in which she played barefoot as a kid, and to the banks of which she returns to paint over and over again. “Spring Creek runs all through here,” said Tate. “You can walk off in the woods just about anywhere and find some pretty spot.” Particularly drawn to painting water for the interplay of light and shadow that its reflections evoke, Tate loves the closed landscape created by the creek’s dappled passage beneath the overhanging tree canopy. “It’s more intimate,” she said, “and harder, too, to reflect the sense of space. Painting a creek is harder than painting an open vista.”
Asked what inspires her, Tate names nature, color, and light as the three things that push her to create. “Color is always the thing that catches people’s eye,” she said, noting that the way she uses color is not necessarily representational. “I think of my painting as intuitive, impressionistic,” she said. “Sometimes capturing the essence of a place means making things a little brighter than the real. Otherwise the greens and the browns can kind of take over.”
Ultimately for Tate, the act of painting the world around her—the one she grew up in and was shaped by—is a way of seeing it more completely. “I think that sometimes people who are not into painting have a hard time seeing the beauty that’s around them every day,” she said. “Once you start seeing things impressionistically, the more you are able to see the beauty in the way things are.”
Margie Tate is a member of—and keeps a studio in—the River Oaks Square Arts Center in Alexandria, where she participates in group shows on a regular basis. In January she will be profiled on LPB’s Art Rocks, the weekly showcase of visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. Tune in Friday, January 11, at 8:30 pm or Saturday, January 12, at 5:30 pm across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.
