From Graphic Designer to Full-Time Painter: Erin MacLeod on Leaving the Desk
HALIFAX - Erin MacLeod's studio on Gottingen Street smells of linseed oil and coffee. Along one wall are forty sketchbooks, numbered on the spines. "That is the real archive," she says. "The paintings are what I decided to keep."
MacLeod was born in Halifax in 1979 and spent ten years as a graphic designer at a regional publisher. She had been filling sketchbooks on weekends and holidays since her early twenties. In 2014 she quit to paint full time. "People ask if it was frightening," she says. "It was. But I had been drawing every day for years, and the day job was keeping me from the work I actually cared about."
Her design background still shows. She plans compositions in small thumbnails, cares a great deal about where the edge of a canvas cuts a scene, and is not afraid to leave large areas empty. "Designers learn that white space is a decision," she says. "I took that with me."
Every year she spends four to six weeks away, usually in two or three cities, travelling by train and on foot. She draws in ink and watercolour on the spot, which means standing in the street for an hour at a time, and paints the larger oils later in Halifax. Her recent canvases include a canal in Burano, a tram under the cathedral in Lisbon and a bridge lit at dusk in Paris.
She works in several series at once. "City Streets" and "Waterfronts" are the oils most people know. "Sketchbook Cities" shows the drawings as finished works, and "Still Life & Windows" is the quiet series she paints at home when she is not travelling.
Asked what she wants someone to feel in front of one of her paintings, she thinks for a moment. "That they have just arrived somewhere and haven't decided yet where to go."