Artist File Artist Elizabeth McIntosh
Diana Hamm on Vancouver painter Elizabeth McIntosh’s mastery of form and colour.
THE ARTIST: Elizabeth McIntosh is a Vancouver-based artist who uses a bright, bold palette to create paintings that burst with energy and offer windows into ambiguous narratives. Exploring the line between abstract and representational, and pushing from spontaneous to strategic, Elizabeth continues to create attractive and interesting works.
THE WORKS: Over the course of two decades, Elizabeth’s painting has developed a recognizable language in which repetition and pattern play are consistent visual keys. Early on in her career, her work was very geometric and abstract, with a focus on form and colour. Her new works are still abstract but have recognizable shapes that hint at enough of a story to allow the viewer to create their own tale.
In Cat (2020), for example, the cat is unlikely to be the first thing you see. My eye was immediately drawn to the undulating rainbow lines in the background.
Only after I looked more closely (and read the title!) did I notice that the black framing around the canvas includes a cat on the right-hand side. I really like this playfulness — that things are hiding in plain view.
The contrast between the hidden cat and the hypnotic lines fuels the viewer’s imagination. As Elizabeth explains: “In the end, many of the more recent paintings do have a narrative element but, for me, it’s an ambiguous one. I never have an intention for a painting to be read in a particular way. My hope is that they are open and contain multiple narrative and visual possibilities.”
When Elizabeth started painting, her work was very spontaneous. She did not like to draw, sketch or plan the works; she preferred to be in a natural dialogue whereby she’d begin on the canvas and see what happened. Now her paintings have become more strategic. “I still find a way to improvise in the way I paint them by varying the application of paint and figuring out how the paint should look,” she says. “All the newer paintings have to be made quickly or they don’t meet my criteria of feeling fresh — like they just landed there without effort. If a painting starts to feel at all laboured, I take it off and start over.”
Elizabeth’s paintings are based on an archive of imagery, which includes art history, family photos, iPad doodles and her own life experience. Islands, her last solo exhibition at Vancouver’s Catriona Jeffries gallery, was largely painted during a residency on Newfoundland and Labrador’s
Fogo Island. Elizabeth also has a personal history with Barbados and, in the series, she captures a psychological essence of “island culture” and “island time.” Though two very different places, the notion of slowing down is connective to both. Prop Window (2017), for example, transports you to a place of calm and leisure with an overtone of sea breeze. Prop Window is much more steeped in reality than some of her more abstract work; the repeated purple lines done in a thick brushstroke suggest the pattern and framing of a curtain and a playfulness reminiscent of textile design.
One of the things I love about Elizabeth’s work is how fluid it is. Sometimes it’s representational, sometimes, abstract. In some works, she includes things immediately recognizable to the viewer and, in others, it’s all a mystery. In a recent painting called Flower House (2019), Elizabeth keeps to her pattern and repetition. The flowers are painted continuously through and over the canvas. After looking more closely, you actually work out a figure wearing a dress, perhaps walking through a field of flowers. Or perhaps the flowers are on her dress? I love the ambiguity and that the subject almost becomes an afterthought because the form and colour are executed so well.
COLLECTING: Elizabeth’s work is in major museum collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Elizabeth’s works start at $7,500 for smaller pieces. She is represented by Catriona Jeffries in Vancouver, Canada gallery in New York and Tanya Leighton gallery in Berlin. This international exposure has garnered her a wide collector base.