Whitstable in Charcoal - Charcoal drawings by LIZ ATKIN

About

Liz Atkin is a Whitstable-based artist and educator. She reimagines her Compulsive Skin Picking and anxiety into drawings, photographs and performances. Liz is a mental health advocate and raises awareness for the disorder around the world. She has exhibited and taught in the UK, Europe, Australia, USA, Singapore and Japan. Her artwork and an archive of her advocacy for skin picking is held by the Wellcome Collection.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, she gave away more than 18,000 free #CompulsiveCharcoal newspaper drawings to commuters on public transport in London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Cologne and more. Liz teaches art in schools, hospitals, hospices, prisons, arts venues and universities. She is an ambassador for The Big Draw, the world’s largest drawing festival, focusing on the role of creativity for health and wellbeing. Her work has featured on TEDx, BBC News, Woman’s Hour, Vice, Women’s Health USA, Huffington Post, Channel News Asia, Metro, AlJazeera and more.

Liz Atkin’s Whitstable in Charcoal drawings channel her obsession with capturing the sea. Her instinctive gravitation towards texture is a pull that is deeply interconnected with the physical nature of her life-long experience of Compulsive Skin Picking, also known as Dermatillomania, one of a group of Body-focused Repetitive Behaviours. Liz describes its ‘constant energy – there is a real rhythm to it in my body’.

Drawing with charcoal is her way to refocus this energy through the speed and control of her hands and fingertips across the page. For Liz, charcoal possesses a texturally therapeutic quality, a soothing antidote to skin picking’s deeply tactile character. Since moving to Whitstable in 2021, she has been captivated by this coastline, from sea swimming and walking along the shore, to avidly drawing the tidal textures.