Artists

Christian McLeod

One

  • 30 x 30 in
  • $2,200

Artist Profile

Christian McLeod is the particle physicist of Canadian art.

McLeod’s paintings produce new matter from the kinetic energy of oil-based pigments colliding across his canvases. He daubs and scrapes, pushing and pulling mounds of oil-based colours until he has seized a sliver of time, a snapshot of change. In vibrant abstract works, McLeod interprets the beauty and destruction of the contemporary landscape, capturing the shift between a perceived image and the particles that comprise the whole picture.

After graduating from the Toronto School of Art in 1992, McLeod moved to Spain, where he exhibited locally on the island of Ibiza. He’s also lived in and worked in Mexico and Germany. Currently, his art practice is based in Toronto, Canada.

McLeod’s work is showcased in corporate and public collections, including MHPM in Halifax and Calgary and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, and in private collections across Canada, the U.S., Spain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. His paintings have also been chosen to represent charitable organizations (such as Casey House’s Art with Heart fundraiser) and for book covers for the University of Oxford Press. For two years in a row, McLeod’s paintings have been selected for “Ideas and Visions for a New Concept of Architecture,” a project with the School of Architecture at the University of Valencia in Spain. His work has also been featured in recent articles in Chatelaine, Ottawa Magazine, and 1969. Christian McLeod’s painting ‘Perhaps the Terrace of this Garden overlooks only the Lake of Our Minds’ will be published by Oxford Press on the cover of Philip Goff’s Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

Painting is my way of remembering and interpreting beauty and destruction. I begin by viewing reality as composed of layers of colour and shape, observing the way light reflects off an object and the tension objects generate when placed next to or on top of each other. Landscapes from a great distance become a single object. I try to capture the shift between perceiving the landscape as an organic whole and seeing the particles that comprise it: buildings, rivers, vehicles, birds, harbours, roadways, minerals, machinery, aircraft, farms, data cables, and people in the movement.

Heaps of paint are placed, plotted, and pushed. For some works, this process can take years. For others, the image forms within days. I love the tactile movement of paint across the canvas, but fully half my time in the studio is spent looking, searching the surface of the painting for points of entry. As paintings are worked on and reworked, images accumulate. I tend to work on several pieces simultaneously, exploring different themes in each one.

My paintings live with the involvement of the viewer in the transference of colour and movement that form the narrative. My interest in the shift between macro and micro views is that a century and a half ago, photography liberated painting from the task of representation; today, satellite imagery redefines how we perceive our landscape and environment and thus blurs the line between abstraction and representation. I operate in that gap between abstraction and representation, between the bird’s-eye view and the microscope.

Solo Exhibitions

  • 2014 The Al Green Gallery, 64 Merton Street Toronto, ON
  • 2013 La Parete Gallery, 1086 Bathurst Street Toronto, ON
  • 2012 Gallery Page and Strange, 1869 Granville Street, Halifax, ON
  • 2011 La Parete Gallery, 1086 Bathurst Street Toronto, ON
  • 2010 Gallery Page and Strange, 1869 Granville Street, Halifax, ON
  • 2008 Craig Scott Gallery, 95 Berkeley Street, Toronto, ON
  • 2007 Craig Scott Gallery, 95 Berkeley Street, Toronto, ON
  • 2006 Engine Gallery 1112 Queen St. West, Toronto, ON
  • 2004 Coop Gallery, 112 Scollard Ave. Toronto, ON

 

Group Exhibitions

  • 2016 Gallery 133, 1260 Castlefield Avenue, Toronto, ON
  • 2015 Renann Isaacs Contemporary Art, Guelph, ON
  • 2014 Gallery 133, 1260 Castlefield Avenue, Toronto, ON
  • 2013 Renann Isaacs Contemporary Art, Guelph, ON
  • 2012 Expanding Horizons – Elliott Louis Gallery, Vancouver BC
  • 2012 Artoronto Anniversary Exhibition – Fran Hill Gallery, Toronto, ON
  • 2012 Renann Isaacs Contemporary Art, Red Dot – Guelph, ON
  • 2011 Elliott Louis Gallery, Vancouver, BC
  • 2011 Art/Not Art Seattle Washington, USA.
  • 2011 Renann Isaacs Contemporary Art, NOIR – Guelph, ON
  • 2011 Gallery Page and Strange, 1869 Granville Street, Halifax, NS
  • 2011 La Parete Gallery – Canadian Painters 1950’s to 2010. Toronto, ON
  • 2010 Creative Art Gems – Creative Works Studio. Judy Scolnik – Heffel Auction Canada Toronto, ON
  • 2010 ReCall – The Corridor Gallery – Centennial College Toronto, ON
  • 2009 Creative Art Gems – Judy Scolnik – Heffel Auction Canada Toronto, ON
  • 2008 Nuit Blanche Toronto – Studio Exhibition, # 89 Ossington Ave. Toronto, ON
  • 2008 AWOL Gallery – Square Foot Exhibition, 100A Ossington Ave Toronto, ON
  • 2008 The Forest for the Trees – St. FX University Art Gallery Antigonish, Nova Scotia, NS
  • 2008 Creative Art Gems – Creative Works Studio . Judy Scolnik – Heffel Auction Canada