Maggie Made: Sophomore Painter Finds Inspiration Through Travel

Sophomore Maggie Nottberg is running out of space in her bedroom untouched by her paint brush. Her door is speckled with the stars of the solar system, her headboard is covered in whales swimming in an ocean scape of different shades of blue and her walls are coated in elephants, the sea and abstract paintings.

For Maggie, art is everything. She sees art in the waves crashing when she surfs, and her family’s smiles after she cracks a Monty Python joke.

When she was in fourth grade, Maggie paddled a blue surfboard off the shores of Hawaii for her first surfing lessons. She took to it instantly, going back to surf on different beaches in Hawaii over the next few years in a row — each time noticing the movement of the waves. Ever since, inspiration from the ocean and movement of the waves strikes whether she’s laying on a beach in the Bahamas or surfing in Hawaii.

“I like taking things that have motion or life to them and painting them, and just how it looks like it’s swirling,” Maggie said.

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She watched the way the elephants moved and how she could emulate their figures with her paintbrushes, after the trip painting them based off of pictures from her phone.

Trevor Paulus | The Harbinger Online

“Sometimes when you go to an art museum with a child, it’s sort of a chore,” Tyler said. “With her, I think she used it as an opportunity to see how diverse and how emotionally instructive all of the art was.”

Tyler thinks even her sense of humor is connected to how she’s grown as an artist. She has confidence in herself enough to self-promote her art.

“Making a joke is a little bit like putting a piece of art out and seeing if someone likes it, like what if no one laughs?” Tyler said. “There’s a certain amount of confidence you need to have in yourself to be able to throw out a reference or do something along those lines.”

For Maggie, it’s not about the end product, although she finds pride in everything she makes. She loves the process of painting — looking through her camera roll of pictures of the Atlantic Ocean or elephants, the trips to Hobby Lobby to find the perfect colors and canvas board, finding her current favorite movie soundtrack — Interstellar — to play while she paints.

Maggie doesn’t usually sit down and paint everything at once — she paints over the span of a few weeks, whenever she has a few hours here and there to focus on it. But she doesn’t mind the cups of paint water or pallets of acrylic paints covering the basement floor.

“Everything is just so chaotic, but that’s kind of how my life has always been so it’s just that everything’s fun and chaotic and I paint whenever I have time I do anything,” Maggie said.

Maggie’s always been a naturally good painter. When she was three, her mom, Leigh Nottberg, needed a painting for their front entrance. Instead of buying one, she turned to Maggie. Leigh bought paints and canvases for the two of them and let Maggie take one while she painted the other — the paintings that remain over 10 years later on the wall of their front entrance both look like those of professionals.

“Each night in the basement, I would make two or three colors and we would paint whatever we wanted — there were no rules,” Leigh said. “We could be using the same colors and then finish and the next night we’d go down and make new colors.”

According to Maggie’s friend Kira Patt, her artistic side is visible in her life regardless of if she’s painting.

“She shows it through, duh, her drawings, but also shows it a lot in her daily life, just like the way she writes her notes or sometimes she’ll just doodle in her drawings or her journal,” Patt said.

While she doesn’t plan to build a career with art, Maggie hopes to run a booth in the Prairie Village Art Show next spring to display and sell her work. Given Maggie’s love for acrylic painting and pride in her work, it’s a natural next step to open new planet-painted doors.

“I’m always really proud of what I make,” Maggie said. “Whether it’s a mess up or not, I always end up making it look cool, and I like to show it to people so I’m always really proud of what I make.”