Painter who connected her local roots with artistic modernism to capture the drama of the Cornish landscape
Margo Maeckelberghe, who has died aged 81, was a painter of Cornwall's landforms and coastlines. In capturing the drama of the Penwith peninsula as it faces the Atlantic her work provided a response to artistic challenges faced by the generation of artists who grew up in the wake of the pioneering modernist figures associated with postwar St Ives and Newlyn. Maeckelberghe found her voice by emphasising her rootedness in the landscape of west Penwith, its weather, its colour, its forms and spaces.
She was born Margo Try in Penzance, where she grew up and lived for most of her life. For many years her studio was a cottage on the ridge at the top of the moors between Penzance and Zennor, which was the actual and metaphoric centre of her vision.
She studied in her teens at Penzance School of Art, a thriving school that benefited from teaching by artists in the local community. Margo enjoyed repeating the story that her teacher at Penzance, Bouverie Hoyton, was horrified that, aged 17, she chose to study at Bath Academy of Art at its postwar home of Corsham Court in Wiltshire rather than at the Slade in London, where she had also been offered a place.
Corsham had become an important centre for the visual arts in Britain. Its principal, Clifford Ellis, appointed artists of stature to head its specialist courses; the head of painting was William Scott. Rigorous study of the key building blocks of painting was emphasised, but new values and a sense of currency with the wider, burgeoning modern art scene was created by visiting tutors.
These included many from the modern art community in Cornwall, such as Bryan Wynter, Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon. Lanyon was a particularly important influence. While at Corsham (1949-52), Margo was therefore able to connect her Cornish roots with the new painting language being formed by people who were to become her mentors.
After Corsham, Margo taught art at Kingswood comprehensive school in London, and met and married Willy Maeckelberghe. Willy came from a Belgian family but had grown up in London, and was training there as a doctor. Margo left teaching on the birth of her son, Paul, in 1954. Willy's military service as a young doctor led to travel for the family, including a posting in Gibraltar. When their second child, a daughter, Nico, was born in 1958, Willy went into general practice in Penzance. This allowed Margo to immerse herself again in the places where she had grown up.
From then on she dedicated herself to painting. Her imagery remained that of the landscape. Her work took on a linear structure, informed by the abstraction of her teachers and mentors, but not evolving into the purer formal and associative language for which they had become known. Instead she based her images on structure in the landscape.
Sweeping lines blew over the blues and greens of horizons, slopes and cliff edges. Extended Landscape (1969) encapsulates the imagery of the central phase of her work, while Westward Scilly (1987) shows her work becoming softer, her hues deeper, in part as a reaction to the extraordinary sense of space and intense light experienced in her forays to the Isles of Scilly.
She became prominent in artists' organisations. She was involved with the Newlyn Society of Artists throughout her career, showed with the Penwith Society from 1961 onwards, and became its chair in 1997. Her straddling of the modern art community and the world of traditional Cornish culture was represented by her becoming a bard of the Cornish Gorsedd (1997), taking the name Lymner: the Cornish for "painter".
Despite her prominence in exhibitions in Cornwall and beyond, she sometimes felt that the perception of her work suffered from being neither in the canon of the leading figures who dominated her early career, nor part of the revision of what it meant to be an artist from Cornwall that developed after the Tate's 1985 survey, St Ives 1939-64, in which her work was not included.
But in 2008, Extended Landscape, perhaps the most significant exhibition of her paintings, was mounted at Tate St Ives. This allowed a wide audience to see the Cornish landscape through her eyes and to celebrate the work of a dynamic woman.
Willy died in 2007. Margo is survived by Paul and Nico, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren
• Margo Maeckelberghe, artist, born 11 August 1932; died 10 January 2014