RECENT EXHIBITIONS
Wilderness: Suite of Sketches
September October 2023
Raw and experimental, Macdonald uses paint to conjure the subject. These sixteen painted sketches are from eleven inches to four foot; smaller in dimension than usual, but ambitiously executed. Click on image to view show.
Smoke & Gasoline:
On the Trail of Tom Thompson and Emily Carr
Mayberry Fine Art , Winnipeg MB 2018
In this body of work, Macdonald re-visits two iconic Canadian artists: Tom Thompson and Emily Carr. Both Thompson and Carr embody a solitary artistic pilgrimage and the strong spirit of isolation that the Canadian landscape similarly evokes.
The biographies of these two artists have been objectified into the fabric of Canadian history and the limited photographic images of them that remain are crystallized by the lenses of time, myth building and legacy.
Macdonald mines the internet and excavates some of these photographic stock images of Thompson and Carr. Through a process of painterly reinvention he seeks to reinterpret and give them a new perspective.
He endeavours through the transformative use of paint and materials to pose a dialogue and coalescing synergy between himself and these artists of the past. Using unrestrained invention, he attempts to be free from the constrains of a developed style. They are specimen paintings in aggregate- in the act of becoming at moments aggressive, jarring, or soft and whimsical.
In these portraits Macdonald captures a wild raw quality, focusing on the vocabulary of painting more than the actual image in the attempt to connect with the spirit of the Artists.
Backwoods
Fault Line Projects 2018
The paintings presented in this show are part of an ongoing body of work developed over the last number of years evolving out of landscape, figurative, and other subjects Macdonald has been working with.
The current paintings have a layered approach, both physically and in their contained psychological narratives. They have a baroque sensibility mutated with various isms.
These are images inspired by Macdonald’s immediate surroundings. Some take on the essence of the sleepwalker – in transformative moments, living in the past, present, and future. These time travellers are not necessarily in the images but for the most part moving both physically and conceptually out of them, leaving you as the viewer ultimately alone to grasp their meaning.
Unnatural Histories
Two River Regional Gallery Prince George, BC 2018
This Museum exhibition is a collection of Macdonald’s paintings, most large in scale, that encompass the wider narratives of his work. One of the central pieces is a construction, fifteen by twenty feet in size named as the show Unnatural Histories.
This construction is an adaption of the painting Fathers of Confederation by Robert Harris in 1867, and later repainted after a fire by Rex Woods in 1964. Constructed with ironic intent, Macdonald uses the same methods as the original artists in editing, collaging, reconfiguring to suite whatever political message they wanted to portray. The artistic process parallels the political process, built with scrap wood, and broken cabinets inverted to expose the glue marks, just as cabinet ministers replace each other, or jostle for power, get ousted, or re-elected. It uses a faux cubist, faux structuralist methodology that is haphazardly slapped together with a power nailer. Unplanned, and starting with little infrastructure, it grew together through trial and error, just as the Canadian constitution itself grew together out of order and disorder.
Some of the circular heads are detachable, can roll, can be reassigned, and moved around. All these elements mimic the political process, and are analogous to the apparent momentary negligence and buffoonery of Sir John A Macdonald himself. The image is both comical and serious invoking pop and folk art, cubist and abstract expressionism placing itself in disparate times and places. It is organic, roughly hewed, garish, vulgar, unfinished, adapting and in a constant state of becoming and renewing or regressing, and disintegrating with the potential of moving in many different directions, forward and backwards in time.