1 minute read
EUAN MACLEOD
from IMPORTANT WORKS
Digging / Painting / Rain (2009) oil on canvas
stretcher: 840 x 1197 x 31 mm signed, dated, titled verso
Openly acknowledged as one of the foremost painters currently working in Australia and New Zealand, Euan Macleod is represented in numerous public collections of importance in both countries and is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes such as the Archibald, Sulman, Blake and Gallipoli.
Energetically applied, Digging / Painting / Rain (2009) is strikingly biographical in one sense for “the figure represents the painter” but in another it is us, “his audience.” This symbolic duality where Macleod “consistently uses the physical world as a mirror for his personal preoccupations” 1 conceals and reveals. Metaphoric and symbolic, we see the lone figure / the artist digging up the very landscape he stands upon and is rendering.
Representing “the artist’s relationship to place” 2 with something of a ghost-like presence developed by the white, light rain falling straight down partially hiding a darker absorbent background, narratives emerge about identity and how - ultimatelythe landscape in turn comes to shape and define its occupants.
