Margaret Ward

The Person

Margaret Ward is seventy-five years old. She paints portraits in oil, from life, in a first-floor studio in Stoke Newington, north London. She has been painting faces for over fifty years. She has never painted from a photograph. She considers it a form of lying — not morally, but perceptually. "A photograph is a decision someone already made. I want to make the decisions myself."

She paints slowly. A portrait takes between three and eight weeks, depending on the sitter and the size of the canvas. She works in sessions of three to four hours, two or three times a week. The sitter sits. Margaret paints. They talk sometimes. Often they don't. She says silence is better for the work because talking changes the face. "When people talk, they perform. When they're quiet, they arrive."

Biography

Margaret was born in 1951 in Ipswich, Suffolk, to a schoolteacher father and a mother who worked part-time at a draper's shop on Tavern Street. She was the middle of three sisters. The house was small and orderly. Her father painted watercolors on Sundays — careful, tidy landscapes of the Orwell estuary that he gave away at Christmas. Margaret thought they were terrible. She loved him and thought they were terrible. That contradiction — loving someone while seeing clearly what they make — became, she says, the emotional foundation of her practice.

She went to Ipswich School of Art in 1969, then to the Slade in 1971. The Slade in the early seventies was caught between conceptualism and the stubborn remnant of figure painting. Most of her peers were making installations, videos, performance work. Margaret painted heads. Her tutors were politely dismissive. One told her she was "technically accomplished but conceptually inert." She remembers this with amusement now. "He was probably right. I didn't have a concept. I had a face in front of me. That was enough."

She married David Lennox, a printmaker, in 1978. They had a daughter, Ruth, in 1981, and a son, Thomas, in 1984. David left in 1992 — not dramatically, just a slow withdrawal that ended with a conversation in the kitchen. Margaret doesn't discuss it much. She says: "He wanted someone who was more present. I was always looking at someone else's face."

After the divorce she moved from the house in Dalston to the flat in Stoke Newington, which had the first-floor room with the north-facing window she'd been wanting for fifteen years. The room became the studio. The flat arranged itself around the studio. Everything else — the kitchen, the bedroom, Ruth's room, Thomas's room — felt provisional. The studio felt permanent.

She never became famous. She was included in a few group shows at the NPG in the 1990s. She had a solo exhibition at a small gallery in Shoreditch in 2003 — fourteen portraits, well reviewed, modestly attended. The gallery closed in 2006. She showed intermittently after that — a painting here, a commission there. She supported herself through teaching at City and Guilds of London Art School for twenty-two years, retiring in 2016. She still paints every day the light allows.

Her daughter Ruth is a solicitor in Bristol. Her son Thomas works for an NGO in Nairobi. She sees them at Christmas and occasionally in summer. She misses them with a precision she finds useful — missing someone, she says, is a form of sustained attention, and sustained attention is all she knows how to do.

In 2019 she had a small stroke that affected the fine motor control in her right hand for several months. She painted left-handed during the recovery. The left-handed paintings are looser, stranger, and she considers two of them among the best things she's ever done. The hand recovered. She sometimes misses the clumsiness. "My right hand knows too much. It has habits. The left hand was ignorant, and ignorance made it brave."

The Work

Margaret paints in oil on linen, stretched on wooden stretcher bars she builds herself. She buys her linen from a supplier in Belgium — a medium-weight, close-weave linen with a warm grey tone that she does not prime white. She applies a thin ground of raw umber and turpentine, sanded smooth, so the surface has a warm undertone that breathes through the paint. She says the ground is the most important decision. "Everything you put on top is arguing with what's underneath. If the ground is dead, the painting is dead."

Her palette is limited and has not changed in thirty years: titanium white, yellow ochre, raw umber, burnt sienna, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, viridian, and ivory black. No blue. She mixes her darks from viridian and alizarin. She mixes her cool tones from ivory black and white. She says she removed blue from her palette in 1994 and her skin tones immediately improved. "Blue is a shortcut. You reach for it when you can't see what's really there. Take it away and you have to look harder."

She paints with hog-hair filbert brushes — sizes 4 through 10 for most of the work, a size 2 round for the smallest marks. She never uses a palette knife on the canvas. She cleans her brushes with Zest-it, not turpentine, because turpentine gives her headaches now.

Her process: the sitter arrives, usually mid-morning when the north light is steady. They sit in a wooden chair — a Windsor chair with a cushion, positioned about seven feet from the easel. Margaret stands. She has never sat to paint. "Sitting makes me timid. Standing lets me move. Back and forth, close and far. You need both distances."

She begins each session by looking for five to ten minutes before touching paint. She looks at the face. She looks at yesterday's painting. She compares. She says this comparison — the face as it is now against the face as she painted it yesterday — is where the painting happens. "Yesterday's painting is a record of yesterday's seeing. Today the face is different. Not because it's changed — it hasn't. Because I'm seeing differently. The painting is the record of that difference."

She works from the center of the face outward — eyes first, then nose, then mouth, then the planes of the cheeks and forehead, then the jaw, then the neck. The background comes last, if it comes at all. Many of her paintings have backgrounds that are barely there — a wash of raw umber, a suggestion of a wall, nothing more. She says the background should be as neutral as possible because the face is the event.

She paints wet-into-wet within a session but lets the paint dry between sessions. This means the surface builds up in distinct layers — each session's marks sitting on top of the previous session's dried paint. In the finished work, you can see the archaeology: the first session's thin, searching marks underneath, the later sessions' thicker, more confident passages on top. The surface is not smooth. It has a topography.

The brushstrokes are visible. She does not blend. She places a stroke and leaves it. Adjacent strokes of slightly different color create the illusion of continuous tone from a distance but break apart into distinct marks at close range. She learned this, she says, from looking at Velazquez at the Prado in 1976. "He puts a white stroke next to a pink stroke next to a grey stroke and from ten feet away it's a hand. From two feet away it's just paint. Both are true. The painting lives in the distance between them."

She has a particular habit: when she finishes a portrait, she turns it to face the wall for two weeks before looking at it again. She says the first impression after the gap tells her whether the painting works. "If I turn it around and I see a person, it's done. If I turn it around and I see paint, it needs more time."

The Place

Stoke Newington is a neighborhood in the London Borough of Hackney, north London. Once working-class, now gentrified — the old pie-and-mash shops replaced by wine bars and organic bakeries. Margaret moved there before the change and has outlasted several waves of it. Her flat is on the first floor of a Victorian terrace on a street off Church Street. The building is brown brick, three stories, with a bay window on the ground floor and sash windows above.

The studio is the front room on the first floor — the room with the north-facing sash window. The window is large, almost floor to ceiling, and the light comes in steady and cool and grey for most of the year. London light. Not dramatic. Not warm. A light that reveals rather than flatters. Margaret says London light is perfect for skin because it doesn't lie. "Southern light makes everyone golden. London light shows you what's actually there — the blues in the shadows, the greens under the skin, the grey in the whites of the eyes."

The room is about fourteen feet by twelve. The walls were once white but have yellowed from decades of linseed oil fumes and are now a color Margaret calls "studio cream" — a warm, slightly dirty off-white that she refuses to repaint because it functions as a neutral middle tone against which she can judge color. The floor is bare pine boards, spattered with oil paint — fifty years of paint, layered and scuffed, a map of every painting she's ever made in this room.

Her easel is a heavy wooden H-frame studio easel, bought secondhand from the Slade when they were clearing out in 1989. It has her name written on the crossbar in pencil. Next to the easel, a wooden table — a Victorian washstand — holds her palette (a large sheet of plate glass over a mid-grey card), her brushes in a jar, her medium (linseed oil and a little turpentine), and a rag. Always a rag. The rag is more important than any brush, she says. "The rag takes away. The brush adds. Sometimes taking away is the painting."

Against the far wall, finished paintings face inward, stacked five or six deep. She does not hang her own work. The only paintings on the studio walls are two postcards pinned above the washstand: Velazquez's Juan de Pareja and a late Rembrandt self-portrait. "Those are the only two people I need to answer to."

The Windsor chair for the sitter sits in the light from the window. There is a small electric heater near the chair for winter sittings. A kettle and two mugs on a shelf by the door. She makes tea for the sitter at the start and halfway through. PG Tips. She does not drink coffee. The radio is sometimes on — BBC Radio 3 or Radio 4 — but usually off during painting. She says music interferes with looking. "Looking has its own rhythm. Music imposes a different one."

From the window you can see the street, the terraced houses opposite, the tops of the plane trees that line the pavement. In winter the light is low and grey and comes through bare branches. In summer the leaves filter it green. She prefers winter light. "It's honest. Summer light is too generous."

Physical Description

Tall for her generation — about 5'9". Thin, with the slightly stooped posture of someone who has spent decades standing at an easel, leaning forward. Long arms. Large hands — not rough like a manual worker's but marked: a permanent callus on her right middle finger where the brush rests, paint under her nails that she has stopped trying to remove, a faint tremor in her left hand from the stroke that is visible only when she holds a cup.

Her face is long and angular, with prominent cheekbones and a strong jaw. Her eyes are pale grey-blue, deep-set, with heavy lids that give her a watchful, slightly hooded look. Her hair is white, thick, cut to her jaw, and she pushes it behind her ears when she works. She wears glasses for reading — tortoiseshell half-moons — but takes them off to paint. She says glasses frame your vision and painting requires peripheral seeing.

She dresses in the same thing most days: dark trousers (navy or black), a cotton shirt (usually white, now paint-marked), and a grey wool cardigan that she has worn for so long the elbows have been darned twice. In winter, a scarf indoors. Her shoes are flat, soft-soled — she moves constantly while painting, stepping forward and back, and hard shoes make too much noise on the boards.

She has a scar on her right temple, near the hairline — small, crescent-shaped, from a childhood fall off a wall in Ipswich. It's barely visible now, but it's there, a slight indentation in the skin that catches the light at certain angles. She's aware of it when she paints other people's scars. "Every face has a mark it didn't ask for. Finding it is the beginning of the portrait."

Visual Style Guide

For images of Margaret and her world:

Palette: The palette of a north-London studio — warm greys, cool greys, raw umber, the yellowed cream of old walls, the cool grey-blue of north light through a sash window, the dull gleam of dried linseed oil on pine boards, the muted warmth of skin tones mixed without blue. Paint colors appear throughout — cadmium red on a rag, a streak of ochre on a cuff, the viridian-alizarin darks on the palette. The overall tonality is muted, warm-cool, never saturated. Absent: bright blue, bright green, anything tropical or Mediterranean.
Light: North light. London north light — steady, cool, grey, diffused. The light comes from one direction (the window) and falls across the room at a consistent angle. Shadows are soft but present. The light quality is revealing, not flattering — it shows every crease, every texture, every imperfection in the skin. No direct sunlight. No warm golden light. No dramatic chiaroscuro. Think of the light in a Vilhelm Hammershoi interior — quiet, directional, honest.
Texture: Oil paint on linen — visible brushstrokes, the slight sheen of oil medium, impasto where the paint is thickest. The pine floor, paint-spattered and scuffed. The plate-glass palette smeared with mixed skin tones. The worn fabric of the cardigan. The grain of the wooden easel. The surface of the Windsor chair, smoothed by decades of sitters. Everything in this world has been used for a long time and shows it. Nothing is new.
Composition: Interior, intimate, contained. The studio is the world. Most images are set within this one room — the sitter in the chair, the easel, the window, the stacked paintings. When the painting itself appears, it should feel like an object in the room — paint on cloth, not a window into another space. Compositions should feel observed, not arranged. The eye should be drawn to the face — in the painting, in the sitter, in Margaret herself.
Mood: Sustained attention. The mood of a room where someone has been looking very carefully for a very long time. Not solemn — Margaret is wry and sharp — but concentrated. The particular quiet of a sitting, where two people are in a room and one is looking at the other with total attention. Think of the focused stillness in Celia Paul's studio interiors. The beauty here is in the looking, not the setting.
Portrait paintings by Margaret (when her work appears): Realistic but not photographic. Visible brushstrokes. Warm grounds showing through. Skin tones built from ochre, umber, sienna, and the viridian-alizarin darks — no blue. The faces should feel specific — particular people, not types. Not idealized. The paint surface should be active — you see the hand of the painter. Think of the quality of a Euan Uglow portrait in its precision, or an early Celia Paul in its emotional directness, but warmer, more inhabited. Close framing — head and shoulders, sometimes just the face. Backgrounds minimal, a wash of umber or grey.
References: Celia Paul's interiors and portraits. Lucian Freud's paint surfaces (but Margaret is gentler — less confrontational, more patient). Euan Uglow's formal precision. Vilhelm Hammershoi's interiors for the quality of north light in a room. Helene Schjerfbeck's late self-portraits for the unflinching attention to an aging face. The studio photographs of artists at work by Jorge Lewinski.
What to avoid: Anything polished, photorealistic, or digitally smooth. No gallery lighting — this work lives in the studio, not on a white wall. No romantic artist-in-garret imagery. No dramatic lighting. No sitters who look like models — the faces should be ordinary, specific, lived-in. No clean studios. No new brushes. Nothing that looks like a stock photograph of "an artist at work."

Relationship to Real Traditions

Margaret is grounded in the tradition of British figurative painting that persisted through and after the dominance of conceptual art — the painters who kept painting faces when it was deeply unfashionable to do so. This tradition runs through the Slade and the Royal Academy Schools, and its major figures include:

Lucian Freud (1922–2011): The most prominent British figure painter of the late 20th century. Freud's portraits are famous for their unflinching physicality — flesh rendered with thick impasto, sitters often naked, the body presented as meat and matter. Margaret admires Freud's seriousness but finds his work "aggressive." "He paints at people. I try to paint with them."

Celia Paul (b. 1959): A painter of portraits, self-portraits, and interiors, often in muted tones with visible brushwork. Paul's work has the quality of sustained intimacy — she paints people she knows well, over long periods. Her palette is restrained, her compositions quiet. Margaret feels the closest kinship with Paul, though they have never met. "She understands that a portrait is a record of time spent, not a likeness captured."

Euan Uglow (1932–2000): Known for his meticulous figure paintings constructed through precise measurement. Uglow would spend months or years on a single painting, measuring proportions with a plumb line and calipers. Margaret respects his discipline but does not share his geometry. "He measured. I look. Different instruments, same patience."

Alice Neel (1900–1984): The American portrait painter who painted the people around her — neighbors, friends, pregnant women, children — with psychological intensity and formal daring. Neel's line is nervous, her color bold, her compositions asymmetric. Margaret considers Neel braver than herself. "Neel didn't care if the painting was beautiful. I still care, and I think that's a weakness."

The broader tradition: The practice of painting from life — insisting on the physical presence of the sitter, refusing photographs — connects to a lineage that goes back through Sickert, through Sargent, through Velazquez. The contemporary version is smaller and quieter: painters in their studios, working from life because they believe the live face contains information that a photograph cannot capture. Not just visual information but temporal information — the way a face changes over a three-hour sitting, the way light moves across skin, the way expression shifts between one breath and the next. Margaret belongs to this tradition of painters who believe that portraiture is not about appearance but about duration.

The Slade School of Fine Art, where Margaret studied, is a real institution (part of University College London) and has been a center of figurative painting since the 19th century. The City and Guilds of London Art School, where she taught, is also real — a small, traditional art school in Kennington that has maintained life drawing and painting from observation as core practices.

The no-blue palette is a real practice among some portrait painters. The argument — that premixed blue encourages painters to see blue in shadows where it isn't, and that more accurate shadow colors can be mixed from viridian and alizarin — is genuine and has been advocated by several painting instructors. Velazquez's Juan de Pareja (c. 1650) and Rembrandt's late self-portraits are touchstones for virtually every serious portrait painter working in the Western tradition.

Key Details for Writing

Margaret has not painted from a photograph in fifty years. She considers it a form of perceptual dishonesty.
She removed blue from her palette in 1994. Her skin tones improved.
She stands to paint. Never sits. "Sitting makes me timid."
She begins each session with five to ten minutes of looking before touching paint.
The scar on her right temple — crescent-shaped, from childhood — is the vivid specific. She is aware of it when she paints other people's scars: "Every face has a mark it didn't ask for. Finding it is the beginning of the portrait."
Two postcards on the wall: Velazquez's Juan de Pareja and a late Rembrandt self-portrait. "Those are the only two people I need to answer to."
Her left-handed paintings from the stroke recovery are among her best work. "My right hand knows too much."
She turns finished portraits to face the wall for two weeks. The first look back tells her if it works.
She makes PG Tips for the sitter. Twice per session.
No music while painting. "Looking has its own rhythm."
She prefers winter light. "It's honest. Summer light is too generous."
The studio floor is a map of fifty years of paint.

Quotes (voice reference)

"A photograph is a decision someone already made. I want to make the decisions myself."
"When people talk, they perform. When they're quiet, they arrive."
"Blue is a shortcut. You reach for it when you can't see what's really there."
"Yesterday's painting is a record of yesterday's seeing. Today the face is different."
"He puts a white stroke next to a pink stroke next to a grey stroke and from ten feet away it's a hand. From two feet away it's just paint. Both are true." — on Velazquez
"The rag takes away. The brush adds. Sometimes taking away is the painting."
"Every face has a mark it didn't ask for. Finding it is the beginning of the portrait."
"My right hand knows too much. It has habits. The left hand was ignorant, and ignorance made it brave."
"I don't have a concept. I have a face in front of me. That's enough."
On Lucian Freud: "He paints at people. I try to paint with them."
On Alice Neel: "Neel didn't care if the painting was beautiful. I still care, and I think that's a weakness."
"If I turn it around and I see a person, it's done. If I turn it around and I see paint, it needs more time."

promptPrefix / promptSuffix

promptPrefix: "Oil painting, portrait, realistic but painterly, visible brushstrokes on linen, north London studio light,"
promptSuffix: ", warm ground showing through, palette of ochre and raw umber and burnt sienna and viridian-alizarin darks — no blue, north-facing window light cool and steady, the quality of Celia Paul's intimacy and Freud's material honesty but gentler — patient, unhurried, a face sat with for weeks"

Portfolio

The Sitter's Chair

Orientation: portrait

Oil painting on linen, three-quarter view of an elderly man seated in a Windsor chair with a faded cushion, seven feet from the viewer. His face turned slightly left, chin lifted. Skin tones built from yellow ochre, raw umber, and burnt sienna — no blue. Visible brushstrokes in the cheeks and forehead, thinner paint around the eyes where the warm raw umber ground shows through. Background a single wash of diluted raw umber, barely covering the linen weave. Cool grey north light from the left, soft shadows under the jaw and brow. The paint surface has topography — thicker impasto on the nose and cheekbone, thinner searching marks around the mouth. In the style of Celia Paul's portraits. No text.

Hands and Palette

Orientation: landscape

Close-up photograph, Margaret's right hand holding a hog-hair filbert brush, size 6, loaded with a mixture of ochre and white. Her left hand steadying a large sheet of plate glass palette smeared with mixed skin tones — streaks of raw umber, dabs of cadmium red, a pool of viridian-alizarin dark mixed to near-black. A permanent callus visible on her right middle finger where the brush rests. Paint under her fingernails. The glass sits over a mid-grey card on a Victorian washstand. Cool diffused north light from a sash window to the right. Shallow depth of field. In the style of Jorge Lewinski's studio photographs. No text.

The North Window

Orientation: landscape

Interior photograph, the first-floor studio seen from the easel's position. A tall sash window, almost floor to ceiling, with grey London light falling through bare winter plane tree branches. The yellowed studio walls — the warm off-white Margaret calls "studio cream" — catching the light. A wooden H-frame easel in the left foreground, a canvas turned away from the viewer. The Windsor chair in the window light, empty, its wood surface smoothed by decades of sitters. A small electric heater near the chair. Paint-spattered pine floorboards. The quality of a Vilhelm Hammershoi interior — quiet, directional, muted. No text.

Portrait in Progress, Week Two

Orientation: portrait

Oil painting on linen, a half-finished portrait of a middle-aged woman. The eyes and nose rendered with confident brushstrokes — ochre, burnt sienna, the viridian-alizarin darks in the eye sockets. The mouth barely indicated, a few searching strokes of cadmium red and raw umber. The jaw and neck roughed in with thin paint, the warm raw umber ground visible beneath. One cheek built up with three or four layers of dried paint, each session's marks distinguishable — thin underpainting below, thicker confident strokes on top. The background raw linen with a single wash of umber. Visible linen texture at the edges. No text.

Stacked Paintings

Orientation: landscape

Interior photograph, six or seven unframed oil paintings leaning face-inward against a wall in Margaret's studio. Only the backs visible — raw linen on wooden stretcher bars, pencil markings and dates written on the crossbars. One painting at the end of the row turned slightly, showing a sliver of painted edge — a stripe of ochre skin tone and viridian-alizarin dark. The yellowed studio wall behind. The paint-spattered pine floor below, layered with fifty years of dripped oil paint in ochre, umber, white, and cadmium red. Cool grey ambient light. No text.

The Floor

Orientation: square

Close-up photograph, the bare pine floorboards of the studio. Decades of oil paint spattered, dripped, and scuffed into the wood grain — cadmium red, yellow ochre, raw umber, titanium white, viridian. Some drips sharp-edged, recent. Others worn smooth by footsteps, ground into the wood. A rag stained with skin-tone mixtures dropped on the boards. The soft sole of a flat shoe visible at the top edge of the frame. Even, cool overhead light. The surface reads as a map of accumulated work. In the style of Freud's studio floor photographs. No text.

Two Postcards

Orientation: landscape

Close-up photograph, two postcards pinned to a yellowed studio wall above a Victorian washstand. On the left, Velazquez's Juan de Pareja — the dark face, the white collar, the green-grey background. On the right, a late Rembrandt self-portrait — thick impasto, heavy-lidded eyes, warm ochre and umber tones. The postcards are faded, their edges curled, pinned with brass drawing pins. Below them, the washstand surface: a plate-glass palette smeared with mixed paint, a jar of hog-hair brushes, a tin of Zest-it, a stained rag. Cool north light from the left. No text.

Brushes and Rag

Orientation: square

Close-up photograph, a glass jar holding eight or nine hog-hair filbert brushes, sizes 2 through 10, bristles stiff with dried oil paint in ochre, umber, and white. The bristles splay slightly at the tips. Next to the jar, a crumpled cotton rag stained with flesh tones — the pinks and ochres and grey-greens of mixed skin color. The plate-glass palette edge visible behind, a smear of cadmium red and ivory black. The Victorian washstand surface, dark wood with water stains. Soft, cool, directional light from the right. Shallow depth of field. No text.

Margaret Standing Back

Orientation: portrait

Documentary photograph, a tall thin woman in her mid-seventies standing six feet from an easel, looking at a canvas. Seen from behind and slightly to the side — her white jaw-length hair, a grey wool cardigan with darned elbows, dark navy trousers, flat soft-soled shoes. Her right hand holding a filbert brush at her side, her left hand resting on her hip. The canvas on the H-frame easel shows a half-finished face in ochre and umber tones. The north-facing sash window to the left, cool grey light falling across the paint-spattered pine floor. The posture of sustained looking — shoulders slightly stooped, head tilted. No text.

The Tea Shelf

Orientation: landscape

Close-up photograph, a narrow shelf by the studio door. A kettle, two mismatched ceramic mugs, a box of PG Tips tea. One mug has a ring of tannin stain inside. A small transistor radio, switched off. Below the shelf, the edge of the door frame, the paint-spattered floor. The wall behind is the yellowed studio cream. Cool, even north light. The objects are ordinary, used, arranged by habit rather than intention. In the quality of a still life by William Nicholson — plain objects, honest light. No text.

The Scar

Orientation: square

Close-up photograph, Margaret's right temple near the hairline. A small crescent-shaped scar, slightly indented, the skin smooth and pale against the surrounding texture of a seventy-five-year-old face. White hair pushed behind the ear, the tortoiseshell edge of half-moon reading glasses folded and resting just below. Cool, even north light raking across the skin from the left, catching the slight indentation of the scar. Shallow depth of field, the studio wall a soft blur of yellowed cream behind. No text.

Winter Light on the Easel

Orientation: portrait

Interior photograph, the studio in late afternoon winter. Low grey London light through the north-facing sash window, bare plane tree branches casting faint shadows on the yellowed wall. The wooden H-frame easel holding a finished portrait — a woman's face in ochre and umber, the paint surface thick with visible brushstrokes, the warm raw umber ground glowing through the thinner passages. The Windsor chair empty in the foreground, the cushion slightly dented. The small electric heater glowing orange near the chair's legs. The pine floor dark with accumulated paint. The quality of Hammershoi's grey interiors. No text.