Elizabeth McIntosh

Painter Elizabeth McIntosh (b. 1967, Simcoe, Ontario) creates brightly colored, large-scale paintings that hover playfully at the edge of legibility.

Her works muddle figure-ground relationships and embrace unresolved and ambiguous compositions—inviting viewers to experience the pleasure of puzzling over an unfamiliar visual landscape.

“They can flip back and forth as you're looking at them,” McIntosh explains. “In one instance, it may allude to something in the world that we're familiar with and at another moment they may be shapes that only have relationships within that painting. In the process of viewing, you could go one way or the other. I like how that ambiguity can open up much wider possibilities for each viewer.” While her medium is oil painting, she draws from the process of collage by joining disparate elements in evocative juxtapositions.

McIntosh’s working method is a seesaw between planning and improvisation. She often starts with her own doodles and/or quotations from art historical sources—cropping them, enlarging them, and using them as the building blocks of her painterly compositions. McIntosh might use an unrecognizable snippet of a Matisse or Klee painting or a magnified fragment of her own watercolor or marker drawing. These exaggerated lines and daubs amplify, interrogate, and find enjoyment in the building blocks of modernist painting.

In addition to such preparations, McIntosh makes room for intuitive and improvisational ways of applying paint to canvas, embracing the idea of painting as thinking. McIntosh’s paintings are often quite large, about the height of a body. She explores the ways that physical and tactile traces of human touch can communicate with audiences differently than digital images do. In her work, the mark functions as a record of the artist’s own embodiment and physical presence. McIntosh puts painterly process on display, encouraging us to find gratification in unexpected formal combinations and enigmatic visual worlds.

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