Open Country: Erin MacLeod Turns to Landscape
HALIFAX - Erin MacLeod is best known for her cities, but a growing part of her work has no buildings in it at all. "Open Country", a series she began in 2019, now includes seven paintings: lupins on a dark hillside, a white chapel beside a stream, an empty bench under autumn trees and, most recently, a stream running through oak woods in late October.
The series began on a trip to the Scottish Highlands, where she painted a stone castle on its island at low tide. "Castle on the Loch" sold in 2021 and led to several commissions from collectors in Canada and the UK. "I did not expect landscapes to sell," she says. "I had thought of them as a rest from the streets."
The landscapes are painted differently. The oils are thinner and more glazed than the city canvases, and the horizon is usually low, leaving most of the picture to the sky or the foreground. Her newest work, "Autumn Stream", is a watercolour painted wet-in-wet, with salt dropped into the washes to make the broken texture of leaves on the bank.
MacLeod says she is working on the next group of Open Country paintings for a spring show in Nova Scotia. This time the starting point is the coast near Halifax. "I have been travelling for twenty years to find places like this," she says. "It is a little embarrassing that some of them were an hour from home."
"Open Country" works are shown on her website, with certificates of authenticity available for each painting.