Megan Elizabeth
About The Create! Magazine 10th Anniversary Book: Create! Magazine is honored to celebrate a decade of contemporary art by publishing a look back at previously selected artists: their achievements, career growth, and more since being published. Stay tuned for the book launch in fall 2026, and join our newsletter to stay up to date.
American artist Megan Elizabeth, featured in both Create! Magazine and the Create! Magazine 10th Anniversary Book and currently based in London, develops her paintings through an engagement with colour, movement, and remembered experience. Informed by her travels, her work distils impressions gathered across shifting landscapes and atmospheres. Rather than depicting specific locations, she translates sensory encounters into layered, abstract compositions.
Soft tonal grounds form an atmospheric field against which suspended, leaf-like gestures drift and gather. These recurring organic forms suggest fragments of foliage caught in motion, yet remain deliberately unanchored. Colour operates both structurally and emotively: warm ochres and deep greens punctuate cooler passages, creating rhythm and spatial depth without fixed perspective.
Elizabeth approaches each canvas through a considered exploration of palette. Layers are built gradually, allowing areas of opacity and translucency to coexist. The surface retains a sense of air and circulation, echoing the transient quality of travel—moments glimpsed, held briefly, and reconfigured through memory.
Working with sensitivity and restraint, she creates compositions that balance movement with stillness. The paintings invite sustained viewing, offering contemplative spaces in which colour and gesture evoke the experience of place without describing it directly.
Artist Statement
As a female painter, I capture the power of nature and its fleeting moments. I focus on the effects of dappled light, contrasting shadows, and overlapping textures. Reflections of light on water, shadows created by trees, fallen leaves, and petals on contrasting surfaces inform my subject matter. I paint these fleeting moments so they are noticed.
In my seascapes and petal series, I use many layers of colorful paint and unique textures to capture my awe of nature. My creative process is fluid and organic, much like the content I explore. I work on multiple paintings simultaneously and articulate nature through loose, expressive brush strokes. The acrylic paint is applied directly to the canvas, without any underpainting or sketch below, and blended into many layers by adding white to create tonal variations of color. These layers create the effect of movement, light, and texture. Like the sounds of nature, the stroke of the brush on the canvas is soothing to me.
To keep my art practice balanced, I alternate between canvas and paper. Most of my art on paper are studies for the larger works on canvas. My paintings on paper are composed of watered-down acrylics to capture the desired image, and then oil pastels and pencils create depth.
As a woman and an artist, I appreciate and recognize the power of nature. I have the opportunity to follow a creative path and, in doing so, honor the women in art history who laid the foundation for female artists. After all, my work explores the dichotomy within the feminine world.
www.artbymegan.com
