Margaret lives in south London England. She says that as a child growing up in Lancashire she would draw faces in the margins of her schoolbooks and dreamt of becoming an artist. She has continued in the arts and crafts ever since. Starting with her patch, quilting and rug-making days in America, she went on to graduate with a fine-art degree from Chelsea College Of Art & Design in 2002, London UK. Her main body of work 'Tulips from Amsterdam' - 1996 - 2016 which is now a sequence of over three hundred works of paintings, drawings, installations, prints and etchings whose inception lay in a two and half day trip to Amsterdam. Some of her work can be seen on her web site art-atkinson Her two books of drawings are another form of expression, she says that colouring in her drawings helped her deal with some difficult times in her life, and her love of the tulip extended into a series of drawings 'speak to me softly' which also feature in the two books. Margaret's previous work was abstract painting and printing, using images of Elephants and old lace as her source material, subsequently; she became enchanted when she encountered what was to become known to her, as 'the Elephant Bar' in Amsterdam. She says "A mural of two elephants adorned the wall of this bar and a Turkish lantern gave a beautiful lace pattern across the whole of this area. "This serendipity experience haunted me when I got back to London and started me on a journey which I still find fascinating today". In her work she journeys from the streets and canals of Amsterdam, to the Ottoman Empire and of course Turkey where the Tulip is the national flower. The ''Tulip' series' is embracing the design aspect of her quilting days in America. She also admires the early Netherlands, Turkish and of course our own William Morris designs. In her work Margaret picks up on the issues of gender, identity and fragility of the human psyche, exploring the underbelly of society. She admires the work of Otto Dix and George Grosz in this regard. "I am concerned to develop the works even more within these series of individual works that visit the sites of my own imagination and experience, and those of a collective, social and political history". Always looking for new forms of expression, new challenges within her fine art practice have taken her forward to create a deeper layer of work.