Margy was an artist all her life. Born and raised in California, she earned a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where she studied with some of the iconic painters of the time including Millard Sheets and Phil Dyke.
In 1978 she and her husband, two of their three teenage daughters, a cat, and a dog, moved aboard their 39-foot Overseas sailboat in the Channel Islands Marina in Oxnard, California. In short order, the kids graduated from high school and moved on, the cat and dog found other homes, and Margy and her husband Charlie lived happily for the next 24 years aboard s/v Malua at the base of the Whale’s Tail Restaurant.
For 20 years she ran her Sea Gate Gallery and Studio on the beach in a long, narrow space filled with treasures, dusted with sand, and loaded with personality, snugged between a real estate office and the Rudder Room Bar at the end of Ocean Drive in Hollywood-by-the-Sea. In 2017 she closed the gallery and moved to her home studio, where she worked until her passing in May, 2021, at 89.
“I usually wake up around 2am, pour a mug of coffee and head for the work table I have set up by the front window to work on my new acrylics. For me, that is the best time to explore linear gestures and color fields, to keep asking myself questions like: Why does a color scream in one situation and soothe in another? Where does a line end? Why is lavender a great solution when nothing else is working? And the music comes into my head through my iPod in stereo clarity, turns a color and flows out of my brush onto the canvas. When the sky starts to turn light, I go back to sleep for a few hours before my day begins.” –from Artist Margy Gates “New Beginnings” Show at Gallery 28, Ventura County Star, 27 Jun 2013
We are proud and grateful to have over 45 of her beautiful works of art preserved and reproducible as giclée prints offered here on this website.
Margy Gates Art 