LEAH BEGGS: SUNDAY INDEPENDENT INTERVIEW - 27 Feb 2022

MY FAVOURITE ROOM:PAINTER LEAH BEGGS UNIQUE SLOPING HOUSE 

WORDS BY MARY O'SULLIVAN / PHOTOGRAPHY BY TONY GAVIN

Artist Leah Beggs moved into her new home during lockdown and she has made it cosy with all finishes done and furnishings complete. Her training in interior design proved handy indeed

Mary O'Sullivan 

Sunday Independent: Life Magazine

February 27 2022

Art is a visual medium but many of us need words to find our way into a painting, so it can be frustrating to come up against work titled Untitled or one that has a single-word title that seems to mean nothing or is, at best, oblique. Artists who provide limited titles have their own reasons for doing so, but it is nice to have the option of enjoying an interesting title as well as the visual side of a painting.

Connemara-based painter Leah Beggs loves to give titles to her works and actually collects phrases to use with her paintings. “I’ll overhear conversations or someone will say something to me. I was out walking one day on Diamond Hill in Letterfrack. There are a couple of loops you can do and I was doing the lower loop. There were two lads building a fence and one said, ‘Tomorrow the top’, as in, you’ll walk the top loop. But I thought, ‘What a lovely title for a painting’,” 

Leah has a new exhibition at the Solomon Fine Art gallery in Dublin which runs until March 5. Her exhibition is titled More Than Us and it includes paintings such as Not My Journey To Make; Feeling Joy; Candyfloss Sunset; Storm In A Teacup; Old Habits Die Hard and Missed Opportunity. The works are painted and then she attributes the titles; in this current exhibition’s case, the titles are all phrases reminiscent of the last two years. While her stunning works are quite abstract landscapes in moody shades of blue and pink, the titles reflect the time they were painted, a time that has been more arduous for some people than others.

 A lot of people have been extra productive too and that group includes Leah. Forget the sourdough, the sea-swimming and the patio-building projects that many undertook, Leah not only completed enough paintings for her current exhibition but she also looked after her two children — with her husband, Darragh O’Flaherty, of course — and was involved in the building of her new home from start to finish. 

“We broke ground in January 2020, then two months later, we were like, ‘What’s going on?’ Shut-down. Then when it did open again, there were supply issues or every other trade was getting Covid. It was meant to be a seven-month build. But we weren’t too bad; we moved in in April 2021.”

When it came to the new house, and especially the interiors, it helped that as well as being a trained artist, Leah also qualified as an interior designer and worked for many years with architects; she didn’t become a full-time artist until she was in her late 20s. 

However art has always been her big love, ever since her childhood in Blackrock, Co Dublin. “I’m the second of four and I was always the art kid, always doing arty stuff. My mum and my aunts are very creative and my grand-aunt used to teach in NCAD so it runs in the family.”

She studied at Dún Laoghaire College of Art and specialised in painting and ceramics. “I always thought I wanted to be a sculptor, but in first year you get to try everything and, while I enjoyed sculpting, when I got a go at painting, I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is what I want to do’,” she says. “With sculpture there’s a lot more left to chance and it’s a bigger thing. The process is so much longer to the end result. With painting, it’s a bit more instant; you can do a small painting and be a bit more happy with it. 

“That said, it takes me a long time to come to my finished pieces. I do a lot of layers and I would work on a lot of paintings at the same time. A lot of the time I’m waiting for paint to dry and each piece feeds the next.”

The answer for Leah was to continue living with her parents and do a full-time, three-year course in interior design. “I felt it would still be creative but there would be a pay cheque.” 

She then got a job with AIB doing office layouts but it was never going to be her career. 

While at college she had met Darragh, who studied film, and in 2001 they decided to go to New Zealand for a year. “We headed first to Australia then onto New Zealand. We loved it there. At the time there weren’t many Irish there, which was great because we got friendly with a lot of Kiwis. Darragh wanted to stay and if we didn’t have family here we probably would have stayed,” Leah reflects, adding that she had got work related to her two disciplines. “I worked in an art gallery and an office-furniture-making company, doing space planning.”

The travelling was good in several ways including from the relationship point of view. “Travelling like that either makes or breaks you, I think.” So when they came back in 2003 they realised they would like to try somewhere other than Dublin to live and opted for the Galway area, living first in Furbo, then in Oughterard, where the couple, who got married in 2006, bought a house. Two children arrived, Siún, (now 12), and Conall (10).

Darragh got work with Co Galway-based broadcaster TG4 and is currently a promo director; fortunately, he has good Irish. “Darragh is from Tipperary but his dad’s family are from Clifden and he would have spoken Irish to his granny when he was young.” 

 Meanwhile Leah got a job with an architect in Galway. “I was working as an interior designer. It was boom time and you couldn’t build it quick enough. It was mainly commercial work, hotels, bars, the odd one-off house.”

After three years, she decided to open an interior design-led shop and art gallery in Oughterard. That was great for about a year but when the crash came it wasn’t viable and she closed it after two years. 

Coincidentally, good things started to happen for Leah from an art point of view. From the time she came back to Ireland she had worked away quietly at her painting and got a break when the Kenny Gallery in Galway offered her an exhibition in 2007 with three other artists. A couple of years later, she got a solo show with Kenny’s, and more shows followed with the Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Co Mayo, and the Signal Arts Centre in Bray, Co Wicklow. “Things were going well. I thought maybe it was time to start pushing this full-time. I had a shed I was painting in. I could be painting while the baby — Siún at the time — was sleeping.” 

These exhibitions were followed by selection for a show in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Council offices. Tara Murphy of the Solomon Fine Art gallery curated that show and asked Leah to exhibit with the Solomon in 2014, and she’s been represented by the Solomon ever since.

Leah would be the first to say she has an advantage over many artists as she lives in one of the most inspirational places in Ireland. “Artists have always talked about the light in the West but there definitely is something different about it. Since moving here, my subject matter has changed. It’s landscape and it’s abstract and I’d be taking in colours and moods. I paint feelings more than the actual mountains. I would be very into the paint itself and how you can paint depth without putting on thick layers.”

She’s lucky too as she now has a new studio, which is alongside her new house on the outskirts of Oughterard. “We had been looking to buy an old house to renovate, but the opportunity to buy this site came up. What you were going to have to spend on an old house to bring it up to modern standards balanced out with the cost of a new house, so we decided to go for it,” Leah says.

There was a possible hitch – the site is on a very steep incline — but their architect found a solution. “The architect Lester Naughton is actually from New Zealand. He’s a friend from the Galway office that I worked in. We were both there at the same time. He had designed a house for one of Darragh’s colleagues, which we really liked and it was a similar finish — corrugated steel. Kiwis use that steel finish a lot,” Leah says, adding with a laugh: “He said if he didn’t get planning [permission] he’d redesign it for free.”

The hill element was tricky: the dilemma was whether to build it all on a level at the top, but then there would be a drop to the garden, or find another solution.

Lester’s answer was to work with the slope and build four levels with the living area at the top and another living area just below that. The bedrooms on the two levels below; there are four bedrooms, one en suite. Very cleverly, there’s a utility room down at the bottom of house, near the bedrooms. 

Leah has created a very cosy home in a very short time. It has lots of contemporary touches — polished concrete floors, large expanses of glass and particle-board ceilings — but she has softened it all with clever interior design: lots of wood, textures and paintings. 

It’s an unusual house both inside and out and, according to Leah, people were bemused by it during lockdown as it was being built. “This is a walking route. It attracted a lot of attention and people made all sorts of comments. I call it the Marmite house: you either love it or hate it.”

Fortunately, as a family, they love it and no doubt some of those comments will end up as titles of paintings for her next exhibition. 

Leah Beggs’s exhibition ‘More Than Us’ continues at Solomon Fine Art gallery, Balfe Street, D2, until Saturday, March 5.

See solomonfineart.ie

See leahbeggs.com

Instagram: @beggser