David McKay, RCA
| Artist's CV |
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LAST FLURRIES IN APRIL
APRIL EVENING RAIN |
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GREY DAY AND CROWS |
FIRST FLURRIES ALONG THE COAST |
EVER PRESENT CROWS
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DRIFTWOOD BEACH |
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LIGHT COMING THROUGH THE FOG One day last summer, Sharon and I took our seven year old granddaughter Olivia and another little girl, to the Irving Nature Trail in Saint John. As we walked along the trail which follows the coastline, the little girls kept scampering down onto the rocks below. After several rescue trips down along the shoreline, I realized that the rocks, water, driftwood and fog that I was surrounded by, might make an interesting subject for my artwork. Although I had no sketching or painting equipment with me that day, the memory stayed vividly with me for some time. Several weeks later, back in my studio, I decided to do a tiny watercolour painting from memory. That led to several more tiny watercolours then to several mid-sized watercolours. The imagery was still fresh in my mind when I started the large egg tempera painting (above) which I titled "Light Coming Through the Fog". David McKay, 2012
LIFTING |
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MORNING SHADOWS
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SUNSHINE THROUGH THE FOG |
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NESTLED IN |
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THE OLD BUILDINGS AT MORNING
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RETIRED V-STERN ARTIST STATEMENT When I think of my artwork, I think of my home province of New Brunswick, my years as a child growing up here and its beautifully humble landscape and buildings. That is what has inspired my art for over forty years and continues to do so. However, the word beautiful can be misleading. It is not only the brightly coloured leaves of autumn along the Nashwaak Valley or the brilliant sunsets over the Saint John River that I find beautiful. These things are beautiful but, from an artistic point of view, are also dangerously close to being merely decorative. The beauty that I seek, and find inspiring for my work, are the images that have an emotional impact grown from my life’s experiences associated with them. Those first small flecks of snow falling against a dark grey November landscape for instance, or a warm breeze late on an August night ... things that make me stop and wonder ... and remember. I use two traditional media for my painting; watercolour on paper and egg tempera on panel. Working in watercolour gives me the freedom to be both loose and controlled at will and within the same painting. I love the experimental nature of the medium. The egg tempera medium is more controlling than watercolour and has a narrower range for manipulation. I am drawn to the earthiness of this medium and at times, there seems to be a physical affinity between the subject matter and the actual paint that I am applying. The paint mixture is very thin and the thousands, maybe millions, of tiny translucent brush strokes give an egg tempera painting its unique appearance. Although I am considered a realistic painter, it is not necessarily my intention to be realistically accurate in my renderings. My approach to painting seems to come from a combination of memory and imagination. It is always the emotional relationship that I have with my subject, rather than the factual depiction of its details, that I try to convey. Craftsmanship is very important to me. I have made an extensive study of various pigments and other materials used in my art making, particularly my egg tempera painting. I am disciplined and dedicated. I try to work all day, five days a week at my studio and reserve the evenings and weekends for the business development of my profession. At sixty-seven years of age, my dream for the future remains as it was as a young man, to be fortunate enough to spend my full time creating and promoting what I love about New Brunswick. David McKay, 2013
RISING WATER |
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FIDDLEHEAD SEASON |
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FARM WITH LOGS ALONG THE SPRINGHILL ROAD
ALONG THE SPRINGHILL ROAD |
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Nikki Thériault chats with David McKay before the opening of his exhibition "Fields and Generations"
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AN ISLAND IN MAUGERVILLE |
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CHRISTMAS EVE ON THE ISLAND
MELTING RINK The Telegraph Journal's Marty Klinkenberg featured an interview with David in conjunction with TNB's Hockey Dreams on March 17, 2011, The gentle, constant roll of time is most poetic when characterized by the many generations of a family. David McKay finds the same poetry in the light and shade of his painterly fields. His watercolour and egg tempera works present nature in time; they witness stone walls continually added to by generations enclosing the beauty of their fields; they present the permanent weight of stone and tree-trunk, like a grandfather at a family’s foundation, while watching the joy of crows wheeling or leaves dappling overhead like grandchildren at play. Here is freedom in the enduring beauty of time. Leopold Kowolik, 2010
EARLY NOVEMBER ORCHARD
ALMOST THE END OF SUMMER
MORNING FOG ALONG THE RIVER |
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MOODY MORNING
Born in Barkers Point on the Naskwaak River, David McKay has lived in New Brunswick all his life and he rarely travels. His first exhibition was in 1971 and was such a success that he gave up his job as a structural engineering technician to pursue art professionally. That he was entirely self-trained was an added measure of the artist's potential. For the past thirty-five years, therefore, David McKay has been exploring and developing the subject matter that has interested him since his early success. He began working in watercolour and acrylic but very quickly discovered that he was most attracted to egg tempera paintings. There was an element of the smoothness in the linear, layered paint that made the paintings so interesting to David. For a while he worked in acrylic using tempera painting techniques. Thinned-down acrylic shares some of the qualities of the egg-yolk based paint but tempera has a transparency that acrylic can never approximate. So, by the late seventies, David took the final step into the involved world of tempera, preparing his own paints from selected pigments, distilled water and egg yolks. Thousands of eggs later and David has not touched acrylic again. In tempera paintings, myriads of tiny brushstrokes layer together, each one revealing something of the colours beneath. When the paint hardens into a uniform surface, the painting glows as light plays off each translucent brushstroke. This technique has been admired for its inner radiance for centuries and due to the stability and durability of the paint examples from the 1st century AD are still extant. David balances the labour and patience demands of tempera with the relaxed and forgiving watercolour technique. The two media are so different that one offers perfect alternatives to the other – and yet all David's paintings are united by their vision and their subtle, layered composition. The long traditions of watercolour and tempera do not lessen the contemporary impact of David McKay's paintings. He applies a constantly developing eye to the ageless beauty to be found in New Brunswick. The vigour and drama of nature – silhouetted trees, loose grasses, hillsides, dynamic skies and calm waters – is balanced with studies of rural architecture. David paints what he likes to look at, and the manmade surfaces placed in nature have fascinated his eye for years. Recently the human figure has returned to his paintings and with it a narrative has been introduced to the calm images. The textures David paints into his environment, whether a weathered barn's clapboards, a rolling cloudy sky, or the brick of a chimney, are the marks of a high level of sensitivity and perception. The stillness of solitude found in the country defines Mckay's oeuvre. The trees, skies and reflections, the barns, smoke and figures all distill New Brunswick into colourful and introspective paintings. David McKay has had numerous solo exhibitions and has taken part in some very prestigious group exhibitions – including one with the National Gallery. David was the subject of a Bravo documentary and his art represented Canada at the Montreal Olympics, at the Centre de Culture in Paris and a painting was commissioned and reproduced for an edition of the phone book. David's paintings are featured in the significant private collections of New Brunswick and he has a painting in the collection of HRH Prince Andrew.
A FEW WORDS WITH DAVID MCKAY, BY NIKKI THERIAULT
The Telegraph Journal's Salon section featured an interview with David on August 1, 2009, please click on the link to read the article: |
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