Rowan Magnell
Rowan Magnell’s work moves through forests, fungi, masks, monsters, and imagined ecosystems. Working across pen and ink, oil paint, linoleum print, colored pencil, alcohol marker, watercolor, and needle felting, they build narrative images that combine the familiar and the unsettling. Their recurring concerns include life and death, ecological imbalance, monstrosity, and the Gothic.
Magnell grew up in a household of books, museum visits, and active encouragement of artistic expression. Art also became a means of managing childhood anxiety. Their mother encouraged them to use it as a way to heal and to move through fear, often quoting Carrie Fisher: “Take your broken heart and make it into art.” With a twin who writes and dances and an older sibling who makes visual art, Magnell describes a family environment in which ideas and shared experiences circulate freely.
They have attended classes at the Art League of Alexandria since childhood and continued studying art through middle and high school. Those classes established the foundation of perspective, form, and narrative that still supports the work. Magnell credits comics teachers at the Art League with cultivating a lasting interest in graphic novels, and oil-painting instructor Michelle Cobb with helping develop technical confidence in paint.
At the center of Magnell’s work is the relationship between people and the natural world, especially the entanglement of harm, healing, intimacy, and separation. Climate change is not a separate topic but a pressure that enters the worlds they make. Their images reverse and examine the assumptions of the Anthropocene, often through landscapes that feel altered, threatened, or newly strange.
Monsters are especially important within this visual language. For Magnell, they are figures of exile and misunderstanding, placed outside the borders of accepted humanity but capable of creating lives beyond them. The Gothic offers a capacious framework for this thinking, accommodating forests, dinosaurs, loss, devotion, philosophy, and extinction. “If conformity doesn’t work anyway, why shouldn’t I make authentic, weird, fantasy art?” they ask.
Their influences include Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Sofia Samatar, and Catherynne M. Valente, writers whose work has encouraged an interest in complexity, genre, and imaginative possibility. Among visual artists, they cite Alphonse Mucha’s line and composition, Romare Bearden’s mythological collages, and Hieronymus Bosch’s surreal landscapes. These references guide Magnell away from the purely abstract or mathematical and toward image-making that remains dense with story.
Process depends in part on the medium, but small rituals help establish focus: tools arranged in order, tea nearby, and a particular pencil used for the first sketch. Natural landscapes can enter a drawing nearly unchanged, while built environments tend to return later in altered, associative forms. To the Termite Mound draws on memories of hiking through forests in Germany, where large ditches, nettles, and wasp nests bordered the trails. The unusual perspective places the viewer within or beyond one of those ditches, watching, or perhaps hiding from, a procession.
Magnell is currently a high-school senior and makes work in the intervals available around academic and extracurricular commitments. Long stretches in the studio are reserved for breaks and free weekends. When ideas stall, they do not force an answer. Instead, they let the work rest, returning to it after a hike, museum visit, conversation, or new book has replenished the field of reference.
A recent large oil painting required them to abandon an initial concept under a strict deadline and begin again. The process led to a more personal approach to oil painting, as well as a practical lesson in balancing speed and detail. Magnell is now working on a short comic about wizard duels and trade, with plans to expand its world into a longer narrative about early industrialization and the intertwined interests of forest and town. They also hope to move further into sculpture, community work, murals, and workshops.
