Elizabeth Magill

Elizabeth Magill’s evocative, atmospheric paintings merge her interior states and the landscapes of her youth and adulthood. As her wide-ranging body of work attests, she is interested in experimentation and in pushing her compositions in new directions. She has said, “My approach to painting is always experimental, allowing for previous attempts to give way to newer ones—it’s a kind of unfolding openness I try to follow.” Magill works primarily in oils, drawing her subjects from the bank of photographs she has taken over many decades. She sometimes incorporates the photographs themselves into her compositions. Landscapes, often devoid of human figures or featuring hints of nearby habitations, form the bulk of her output. They appear both plausible and dreamlike, seeming to stem as much from her imagination as from faithful observation.