When researching artists this week, I came across the paintings of Elizabeth Magill. The intention behind her landscape paintings, to capture atmospheric conditions with great sensitivity, drew parallel ideas between my own art practice. Her work is comparably more abstract through her use of colour (bright and often unnatural) and distorted representations of her subjects. Although our styles are very different, I wanted to trial the use of a medium she has used in conjunction with oil paint: charcoal!
I use charcoal frequently, but only ever as a preliminary study before painting. I had never used them together within a painting, and was curious as to whether the use of charcoal and acrylic paint would be successful!
At first, I thought that this would enable me to create landscape paintings in a much more effective way: sketching out the composition upon the canvas, layering paint over this plan and then using charcoal to further enhance elements of the painting.
This idea didn’t prove to be as successful as I had initially assumed. Although the charcoal allowed me to quickly map out the prominent, darker areas of my view, when I came to apply paint, it became almost murky and lost its original colour. I want to make use of the paint’s ability to create an atmospheric representation of the landscape, so charcoal will be left out of my paintings and only used as a medium for informatory preliminary sketches.
Adalia Mynett 