Introduction Many of the figures in the latest collection of Anne Magill’s paintings have somehow found themselves at the land’s end, or been otherwise drawn to some stretch of water, to stand and gaze over it. We can only speculate as to what pre-occupies them. Whether they’re trying to muster the courage to make a journey across that water or whether it’s some business back in-land which has driven them to such a place. There’s a universal stillness to them. Often they have their backs turned towards us, or stand in near-silhouette. It could be dawn or dusk. On occasion, it’s almost as if the figures are a part of the land, have become rooted to it, and making precious little progress in whatever decision they came here to make. These men – and the characters in Anne’s work are predominantly men – seem lost in silence. Whether alone or leaning over railings in twos or threes, they are all quietened by something. Even those paintings in which they are active – rowing a boat, say, or restoring some vintage motorbike (something Anne spent endless hours doing with her father and uncles when she was a girl) – there is a sense of silent industry. It would be no exaggeration to say that these are men, at this particular moment at least, of very few words. When I first encountered Anne Magill’s paintings it took me a while for my eyes to find their focus. As if the characters were emerging from memory, or fading into it. They put me in mind of those late-Victorian photographs, like Whitlingham Vale by G. Christopher Davies, in which a ghostly boat eases its way along a winding river, or P.H. Emerson’s At the Ferry – A Misty Morning,, in which a milk cart stands at the water’s edge. Anne’s Morning paintings seem to occupy a similar, half-dreamed territory. A hazy place, both powerfully present and weighed-down with the past. In fact, photographs have sometimes played a part in the early stages of Anne’s work. Specifically, found photographs – odd snaps picked up in junk shops, or mildewed albums of someone’s travels bought at car boot sales. The fact that these are real, lived lives is clearly important, as is the fact that the individuals in the photographs are ultimately unknown and unknowable. It is as if Anne is determined to honour them – to rescue them from oblivion. In that respect her work is an act of restoration, of recovery. I was down in Anne’s studio a couple of weeks ago. Two of the larger canvases leaned up against the main wall and another three or four, released from their stretchers, hung from a line across the windows, gently lifting in the breeze. We were talking about talismans – the lucky charms we keep around the place. Anne had already shown me a battered portrait of the kindly gent she’d bought for a tenner in a Notting Hill junk shop fifteen years ago. Most of the time he’s tucked away out of sight somewhere, but his beneficence is all-pervading. He is a sort of household god. And now she leafed through a pile of papers and produced a small photograph, probably taken in the 1920s. A man in a knee-length leather coat stands on a beach,
with the sea and rocks spread out behind him. In his hands he holds a pair of Mark 9 motorcycle goggles. Around the beginning of each new collection of paintings Anne often works on some new sketch or miniature of that character. Once the show’s complete (months, sometimes years later) she will return to her most recent interpretation of the chap on the beach and, as often as not, find that it contains some intimation as to the tones and textures of the paintings that followed. Drawing things to a close can be just as tough as getting things moving. Whenever I’ve visited Anne’s studio there have been at least a dozen or more works around the place, in various stages of completion. It must be difficult, I imagine, to know when a painting is finished – when to leave it alone. Anne tells me that just when it feels as if the whole process is in danger of grinding to a halt, a minor adjustment to one of the paintings will act as a tipping point for all the others, and they will all suddenly fall into place. It reminded me of a cutting I’ve kept in a scrapbook since the 1980s – an interview with Tom Waits (a fount of wisdom, in my opinion, on the creative process and much else besides).