A mystical nature
Elizabeth McQueen’s paintings explore inner and exterior landscapes
Elizabeth McQueen’s landscapes grow out of spontaneous scribbles.
The Dundas artist spends about five months of the year at her northern studio, a former church near North Bay. There she paints landscapes inspired by what she sees, but each work begins spontaneously and evolves. What emerges is a kind of mystical inner landscape.
“I often begin a spate of work with a number of more abstract mindless scribbles, for want of a better descriptor, to court the muse and enter a more meditative state, more allowing than constructing,” she says. “What comes out is totally unpredictable and often the meaning emerges much later.”
McQueen has been exhibiting for about 40 years. She has worked with printmaking, photography, and painting on fabric, paper and canvas.
“I have been painting in some ways, all of my life,” she says. “It has only been the past 10 years, however, that I have allowed myself the freedom to explore inner landscapes.”
Last March, she went up north and began a series she calls her “Covid Chronicle.”
“These are mystical landscapes and no doubt a synthesis of a number of true life visions,” she says. “My studio does abut acres of deep woods, but that forest is nowhere nearly that manicured.”
One of the first paintings she finished was “Box Woods.”
“I think I was beginning to recognize that as a planet, we were entering a seemingly endless forest where science and nature might prove to be at odds,” she says. “The title Box Woods came from the obvious visual contradiction that a forest can be so tidily controlled — and my mind can't seem to resist puns.”
McQueen works in a vibrant, forcefully gestural style. She reduces land and sky to a few softedged shapes, painting each one with big brush strokes moving in many directions. A pale-toned horizontal at the bottom of the composition provides a sturdy foreground for a midground massing of dark paint that contains thin, barelythere vertical lines hinting at trees.
“My work has been strongly focused on the bones of the land, but it was after this piece that trees began to appear in subsequent scribblings,” she says.
But when McQueen feels unhappy with a finished painting, she’ll cut it up.
“I cut up one of my paintings that just wasn't working as a whole but the parts had much more power,” she says. “I discovered this by accident when I was framing another work. I had laid a random mat on a pile of paintings and suddenly resaw some energy.”
She ended up with three smaller landscapes. “I love you by the sea” is one of them. A stark white uneven foreground broken by sinuous black lines leaps out. Above this, smaller, more colourful, yet less distinct shapes appear to recede.
“It reminded me of the power of the wind and water by the sea as it constantly erodes new landscapes,” she says.
This changing landscape became a tribute to a close friend whose husband had died.
“A dear friend had moved back to Nova Scotia a year before and
her husband had just died after a very swift battle with pancreatic cancer. An homage to the great love with which my friend continues to search for his spirit as she walks the shores,” she says.
“The fact that this piece is part of a whole that has been fragmented is not insignificant: a metaphor for the disintegration that happens in that year of magical thinking after the death of a lover.”
McQueen is hoping to get back to her northern studio soon to paint.
“Painting has become my meditation and continues to be a magnificent teacher.”
These paintings by McQueen are available through the Carnegie Gallery’s online shop, which launched recently. Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.