}
Neil MacCormick
By Robert Amos
Neil MacCormick recently sent me an invitation to an exhibition of his
paintings (until January 15, 2005) at the O. K. Harris Gallery in New
York City. That gallery is the fountainhead of photo-realist art. Many
of his paintings represent Victoria subjects, though he has never had a
show in Victoria.
Neil MacCormick lives in an unusually spare apartment. There are no
pictures on his walls - even the wallpaper has been stripped to the
scarred plaster. When he answered the door he was carrying a small box
which, as it turned out, held most of his life’s work.
MacCormick’s manner is candid and easy-going, but he sets himself
extraordinary challenges. His recent pictures measure just 5 1/2 x 8
inches. Each floats in the center of a piece of watercolour paper,
brushed with an uncanny smoothness and indistinguishable from a giclee
print of a photograph of the subject.
MacCormick, who was born in 1958, is self-taught. “I grew up in Ontario
and was painting typical Canadian realism - Colville, Pratt, Ken Danby.
I was stumbling and bumbling my way, doing it without photographs, and
I couldn’t get the level of detail that I was aiming for.
“When I began working from photos, I was drawing as carefully as I
could, or “squaring up” the original with a grid. But there is too much
processing in that - your brain is changing far too many things. In
1993 I learned that you can project slides onto the paper on which you
are going to paint.”
He traces from his slides with a very hard, 5H pencil. The tracing,
even for a tiny painting, can take two or three hours. When he begins
painting, he refers to his slide in a little hand-held natural light
viewer. Each painting takes from 150 to 450 hours of meditative work.
The bare table I was sitting at was his work space. It held six little
cups of very dilute acrylic paint - two reds, two blues, yellow and
black - and one number six acrylic brush. That’s it. Simple means,
miraculous results.
Although painting is a personal expression, this artist tries to avoid
his personal imprint. “I am at pains to avoid pushing the emotional
button. I try not to lead the viewer. I want them to feel something,
not to lead them anywhere. I like to feel that, now that I work from
photographs, I have backed away from what I’m working on.”
Yet he can’t avoid leaving his mark. “I guess my own views come out as
a subconscious thing. My underlying psychology is splattered all over
the picture - what I have chosen to do speaks volumes. But I’m always
trying to erase myself.”
Coming to Victoria in 1989, he encountered our urban landscape with
delight. “So many things were here that hadn’t disappeared,” he noted,
remarking on old fashioned signs and stores. “In Toronto they had all
gotten knocked down.”
“What you paint is very important,” MacCormick went on, “an intuitive,
emotional thing.” Neon signs were his first attempt to mark out a
territory, but there were drawbacks. People seemed more interested in
the signs than the paintings.
He broadened his scope to include urban corners and alleyways. “I like
the generational layering, the mixture of architectural types and ages.
The paintings, regardless of my intent, reflect my time, because I’m
the one living in it. ” Not that he’s trying to document these things -
“I don’t want to chase the planet,” he laughed.
“I have been painting full time for 20 years,” MacCormick went on. “I
still feel like I am just at the beginning. I have maintained this path
because I set high level goals in the beginning, and because I am
incredibly dogged. For years it has been my goal to exhibit at O. K.
Harris Gallery in New York. “
In 1996 MacCormick sent a sheet of slides to that Gallery. The owner,
Ivan Karp, wrote back that he’d be “happy to see some of your
paintings.” “I didn’t rush right down to see him,” MacCormick
continued. “I’d never been to the States at the time. “
“I returned in 2003, on a sort of glorified sightseeing trip after a
not-very-successful show in Toronto [at the Bau Xi Gallery]. To my
surprise, Karp said “we need to see more.” The result was his current
show there.
“Achieving things:” MacCormick sighed, “I have this kind of goal thing.
I felt if I had a show at O. K. Harris everything would be fine - it
would really be some kind of watershed. Angels would come down from the
sky singing! But really, it just keeps going on and on. Really, life is
more like plodding across a desert... and there isn’t a sign that says
“the desert is now over”.”
To see more of MacCormicks’ work, visit
www.bau-xi.com or
www.okharris.com
And a postscript. Just before this story went to press, MacCormick
called me to say that the O. K. Harris Gallery had just called to say
they had sold 14 of his 15 paintings and wanted more. Local boy makes
good!
___________________________________________
Copyright © 2004Robert Amos
Robert Amos is an artist and art writer who lives in Victoria, B.C.. He can be contacted by
e-mail and you can view his paintings at
www.robertamos.com