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Lot Essay
‘I’m not so much painting what is there but what I imagine might be there. These works are not landscapes as such, but more like suggested backdrops to how I feel, think and interpret the world’.
- Elizabeth Magill
Imbued with a liminal quality and sweetness of colour, as well as an emotive and subtle melancholy, Land of the Dusky Sow demonstrates Elizabeth Magill’s intense understanding of paint, and her consequential experimentation with her chosen medium. It perfectly embodies Magill’s preoccupation with the balance of and friction between the very act of painting and her subject matter. As Jonathan Watkins explains, she ‘often works on the horizontal, she pours, bleeds and rubs swathes of colour into the picture surface as if to find latent imagery’ (J. Watkins, in exhibition catalogue, Elizabeth Magill, Birmingham, Ikon Gallery, 2004). In her own words, ‘Each thinly diluted application is left to dry and then repeated until I feel as if I’ve got a setting or some kind of scenario with which to work … in some respects I am looking for clues to hand things onto’.
In the present work, this friction between mark-making and figuration is exemplified: the lower centre of the painting is dominated by the deep purple cluster of trees, while the pastel swathes of the rest of the composition are flecked with spatters of yellow and orange pigment. The viewer is immediately pushed to look further than the serene and dreamlike imagery represented and is reminded of the very process of image-making. This process for Magill often incorporates photography, postcards and stills photographed from TV. Removed from their original context, and lovingly rendered through Magill’s meticulous process, they become almost worked into the paint surface. Here, the copse of trees is both part of the ground and subject to the same forces that created it (see A. Wilson, ibid., p. 15).
Magill’s first major solo exhibition was at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol in 1990. In the same year, she was included in the seminal British Art Show which introduced many prominent younger British artists to a wider public.
- Elizabeth Magill
Imbued with a liminal quality and sweetness of colour, as well as an emotive and subtle melancholy, Land of the Dusky Sow demonstrates Elizabeth Magill’s intense understanding of paint, and her consequential experimentation with her chosen medium. It perfectly embodies Magill’s preoccupation with the balance of and friction between the very act of painting and her subject matter. As Jonathan Watkins explains, she ‘often works on the horizontal, she pours, bleeds and rubs swathes of colour into the picture surface as if to find latent imagery’ (J. Watkins, in exhibition catalogue, Elizabeth Magill, Birmingham, Ikon Gallery, 2004). In her own words, ‘Each thinly diluted application is left to dry and then repeated until I feel as if I’ve got a setting or some kind of scenario with which to work … in some respects I am looking for clues to hand things onto’.
In the present work, this friction between mark-making and figuration is exemplified: the lower centre of the painting is dominated by the deep purple cluster of trees, while the pastel swathes of the rest of the composition are flecked with spatters of yellow and orange pigment. The viewer is immediately pushed to look further than the serene and dreamlike imagery represented and is reminded of the very process of image-making. This process for Magill often incorporates photography, postcards and stills photographed from TV. Removed from their original context, and lovingly rendered through Magill’s meticulous process, they become almost worked into the paint surface. Here, the copse of trees is both part of the ground and subject to the same forces that created it (see A. Wilson, ibid., p. 15).
Magill’s first major solo exhibition was at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol in 1990. In the same year, she was included in the seminal British Art Show which introduced many prominent younger British artists to a wider public.