Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, January 3, 2022: Anne Magill, an Irish painter (#1460)

Anne Magill (1962) was born in Northern Ireland. She studied in Liverpool before moving to London to complete her degree at St Martin’s School of Art. After graduating in 1984, Anne Magill worked as an illustrator where she quickly built a reputation for her evocative drawings in charcoal and pastel, winning the B&H Gold Illustration Awards four times.

Alongside her work as a commercial artist, she started to experiment with more intimate charcoal drawings based on memories reflecting her time spent with the army in Belfast, at Greenham Common and in Paris during her studies. The rapid, reportage drawings she made during this time became the precursor to a mature style in which her highly atmospheric paintings are built from anonymous, intimate images, appearing like memories frozen in time.

Her work has won her international acclaim with work hanging in the collection of British Airways, Nike, Levi Strauss, Heineken, Canary Wharf, the Forte Group, SAP as well as major private collections worldwide.

"Anne Magill is a witness, who bears testimony to a series of infinitely still and silent human scenes by means of her painting. The great power of her work is her Hopper-like genius to compel us to weave a story, conjured from our own repertoire about these scenes. Though we do not know the men or women we feel we recognise them, as they stand gazing at an event we cannot see or walking, face hidden under a hat, towards a destination of which we are unaware… Standing entranced before one of her paintings we become convinced that we will understand, eventually, the human truth which inspired the image."
–Josephine Hart

Anne Magill works with few breaks. She paints in oil by night, charcoals and acrylics by day. Ten or more pictures surround her studio walls, waiting for their moment on the easel. Since childhood her painting and drawing was done at this same tireless pace – hour after hour spent bringing a picture to its conclusion. And yet to a casual visitor, those ten paintings would probably appear finished: each image seems complete with no visible underpainting or drawing. Anne remains unsatisfied, revisiting each picture as soon as the previous adjustment has dried, deepening shadows, raising highlights or altering the angles of light as it strikes a figure. Her paintings can take an age and some never get beyond what she calls a “technical exercise” leaving no options for her to explore. By the same token she knows when a painting is working and when the end is in sight: “It is so elusive, but you can feel it coming,” she says. The next layer of paint might generate the spark she is looking for, something indefinable: an element which ties everything together and brings the image to life.

After a lifetime spent developing her art, Anne has reached a level of skill in drawing and painting where technical perfection no longer holds much interest. Nor is it something she wants us to notice. Her paintings are made to be read like photographs, like a found image in a flea market, anonymous portraits, family outings with a picnic and an old Kodak, informal, homespun pictures, with something that holds our attention. The apparent spontaneity of her work masks paintings that are meticulously composed from multiple sources and which adopt the textures and physical appearance of old photographs to create an image that convinces us that its existence is there for a reason. Something significant happened, or is about to happen. They are paintings that intrigue and which seem to take on the aspect of memories: this is the point where the poetry happens, that elusive bit of painting where the work comes to life, our imagination takes the reins, and stories begin to suggest themselves.

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