Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Reid McLachlan
Article 45 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the January 25, 2006 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Mirroring the Human Soul
There is a definition of a poem - as 'something that resists the intelligence almost successfully' - that speaks to the elusive but arresting quality of Reid McLachlan's paintings. We know this place - the dark, sorrowful recesses of the heart - and yet the interplay of symbol and narrative tease us out of thought. We cannot know with the rational reach we employ day to day, dissecting the evidence, coming to conclusions. Reid McLachlan's work demands that we stand open, vulnerable to the fears that lurk beneath our carefully constructed reality.
This is dream space. This is a dialogue of ideas, of veiled meanings, of an obsession with the big themes every human must grapple with - life, love, death, loss, faith. A mirror effect governs the experience: the stories within each painting reflect the viewer, the colour of his soul, the tenuousness of his grasp on life, love. To stand before a Reid McLachlan painting is to be drawn into a Thomas Hardy world where the vagaries of Fate rule, where nothing is certain but the haunting sense that we have been here before.
The colours of Reid's palette charge his vision - those smoky grays and luminous blues, those earth tones that anchor us in an often leaden and barren landscape. He says that within the challenge of each painting, he doesn't have to think about colour; it is organic, it comes to him intuitively.
So too the characters who stand arrested, starkly drawn against this looming backdrop: like figures out of Dante, they are vehicles for Reid's ideas. He does not use models; rather his people rise like icons, archetypes of the unconscious, eyes staring or averted, glazed with inner reckoning. There is something eternal in their clarity of line, in the often distorted dimensions of their limbs as if the perils of being human were vested in the gesture of a gnarled finger, an awkward embrace. They are not soon forgotten.
Reid came to art through a natural progression. He drew constantly as a child in Ottawa, bored with academics. He flourished when he took the High School of Commerce Vocational Art program; then went on to the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. A final year in Florence, Italy in 1987, confirmed his path, winning him top honours and awards. He has painted ever since, exhibiting in dozens of solo and group shows, including the annual Artists in their Environment Studio Tour. His work is in collections across Canada, and sought after by individuals world-wide.
"Painting is like trying to find the answers to the big questions in life - it is human nature to keep on searching. I work until I feel the energy I am putting out on the canvas stays there, a kind of distilled essence. I have no formula, I just begin with a basic idea.
"I love the process. It's amazing because I never know what will emerge - every day is different, the issues shift and change as my mood does. But I am trying to get at that sense of 'presence' where you reveal a truth, veiled, not obvious, but recognizable if you are willing to look for it."