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Neil MacCormick

Posted: January 3, 2005
} 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