Anne Marie McCaughey

Anne Marie McCaughey was born in Omagh and now lives and paints in Australia. She studied fine art illustration in the University of Brighton. While there, she received many prizes and awards and was represented in a number of European travelling exhibitions of prize-winning illustrations. She studied art for six years in total, taking the opportunity to do a postgraduate qualification in nineteenth and twentieth century Art History.

After graduation, McCaughey lived and worked in London, creating illustrations for magazines such as Honey, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan. She returned to live in Ireland in the late eighties and moved full time into painting and lecturing. She decided to focus on developing her vision of Irish landscapes, creating a distinct style of contemporary painting.

"Landscape here has always been a fertile source for artists. It offers so much to explore in colour and light, mood and movement; there are the emotional and historical associations and all the physical sensations to investigate." – Anne Marie McCaughey

McCaughey's work shows a fascination for the ambiguous rather than the ultra-realist and her representations of bog land and vast skies reveal her roots as someone steeped in the countryside of Tyrone and Donegal.

McCaughey is an artist whose work is continually evolving and her move to Australia has proved to be a great catalyst for her work. The new experiences, dramatic landscapes and colours of her new home have resulted in exciting paintings suffused with warmth and atmosphere.

McCaughey has had twenty-five solo exhibitions in a variety of countries, which include, the United States, France, England and Ireland and her work features in collections worldwide. She is represented in the private collections of HRH Prince Charles, the Duke and Duchess of Abercorn and U2 among others. Her work is in the public collections of the Northern Bank, Ulster Bank, BBC1 Northern Ireland, the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland Tourist Board, the Royal Victoria Hospital, Sussex University, CBC Fremantle, Ursula Frayne College and John Curtin College of the Arts.

She has been selected for a number of major awards in Sydney and Melbourne and was runner-up in the Black Swan Portrait prize, worth £30,000 in 2012.