Deeson Gallery: Duncan MacKay
The painting is what it is. Paint on canvas. It asks you to look. It hopes you discover its question. It lives or dies by your response.
The habit these days is to ask an artist to explain purpose, context, content. Many even feel an entitlement to that opportunity. But if the painter has to explain in words, why was he painting?
This is not to expect every element in a picture to be obvious; for the forms and relationships on the canvas to be immediately intelligible. But the sense to be made of the picture, the interest generated, the feeling evoked, the pleasure conjured - these belong exclusively to the onlooker. The artist had his chance when the brush was in his hand.
My thanks go to the Leverhulme Trust for an award as artist in residence for 2011 at the Centre for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, University of Kent, Canterbury. My thanks also to Deeson for the opportunity to exhibit in such sympathetic surroundings.
Artist Q&A
If you were a Pantone colour, which one would you be?
Be careful of the ego, it'll eat anything, including Italian currant bread
In the studio of which artist - dead or alive - would you like to be a fly on the wall.
I don't think flies have a great life
Tell us something great you've just discovered?
There's only one thing worse than being misunderstood
What 3 words define your art?
I paint pictures
Name your top three dinner guests, famous or not, dead or not...
The present is shorter than a microsecond, yet past and future are illusions existing only in that present. Which is what there is and all that there is. Anyway, I only eat with friends
Which book or film do you wish you'd written?
'Down valley a smoke haze / Three days heat after five days rain' etc. Especially the etcetera
What's your favourite journey
To bed
How would you express yourself if there was no such thing as art?
Mathematically
If you were a superhero, which one would you be and why?
Asking the right questions sometimes gets you the right answers
Rock or Roll?
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect on art