Artist Statement

"[each work of art] is a many layered meditation on the vicissitudes and pleasures of the environment."
-Joan Murray 1999 Canadian Art in the twentieth century

I have always lived by the sea, and I also spent 32 years as a fisheries enforcement officer in Nova Scotia, looking at and
into the sea with its infinite subject matter. I am fascinated by how it impacts and transforms everything it encounters. My greatest joy is recreating its ever-changing dance of colour, light, reflection and refraction.
In my current work, I explore moments where land and sea meet, the translucency of multi-coloured rocks alternately bathed and pounded by the shallow water and how light is reflected on and off them in a chaotic burst of colour, movement and power.
I consider myself an abstract (ab-trahere) painter. With as little detail as possible, I pull the image from nature by building up thin layers of paint until I am convinced I have included enough to represent that which I see in my mind's eye.
My works are oil on canvas. I do not use a palette. I apply raw colour and mix it directly on my canvas, working two or more areas that will eventually impact and create a connection with each other. My brush floats around the canvas until all the connections have been made and all parts of my painting are talking to one another - and together, they are communicating what I saw. That's when I know my painting is finished.
When I capture a particular space in time where sea and land coexist, something that is both fleeting and eternal and have you see it also, then I have achieved my goal.

Biography

Eric MacIntosh was born in 1959 and lives in Shelburne NS. He developed his interest in art at an early age with help of his next-door neighbour, a local ship model builder Peter Frotten. Peter's Naive model work was recognized by the Nova Scotia Art Gallery when they purchases and placed one of his models in their permanent collection. The model was one that Eric loved, looking at, and drew as a child. Peter's claim to fame was that he watched the building of the Titanic. Peter was a great influence on Eric and taught Eric the basics of drawing and painting using a variety of affordable and found mediums. Peter taught Eric to stop and look at everything.
Eric became well known in his community for his drawing and painting of the people and the surrounding area. Eric's early painting style was drawn from renaissance book studies. In the '70s Eric's style changed to Impressionism when he discovers the works of Renoir, Pissaro and Lawren Harris.

In 1980 Eric started studying Fine Arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. There he developed an interest in applying Renaissance painting styles and techniques to give him painted control of dept and contrast in his impressionistic works. His college painting inspirations were driven by the strong College influences of impressionism, Cubism and Abstraction. His personal studies were with abstract expressionism mindsets and Automatism concepts. He loved incorporating refined conceptual freedom of expression through paint. He loved the painting freedom he seen in Canadian Abstract expressionist /Automatism painters Reopelle and Borduas work. Eric loved the automatism concept of free reaction and choice.

Eric loves the freedom to paint without restrictions on style or content expectations. His painting is expressive colour and contrasts with renaissance depth applied to the meaningless abstracted subject matter, nautical subject and seascapes. Eric searches out still life and marine scenes of reflective and absorbent subject matter and materials where intense lighting creates a placeholder for his painting and seeing. Eric manipulates his subject and content to please his painting experience and possibly even the viewer's experience.
Eric has over a hundred paintings in private collections across Canada and over 60 new paintings available.
Eric has had his work shown at:
NSCAD students show Halifax
FAR AND WIDE group show; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and its annexes in Sydney N.S., and Yarmouth N.S.
The Black duck gallery luneburge, N.S.
Shelburne Arts Council Gallery Shelburne NS
Osprey Arts Centre Shelburne NS
The Laurie Swimm Gallery, Lunenburg N.S.
Boxing Rock Gallery Shelburne NS
Emerald Light gallery Shelburne NS