Euan Macleod - Flux

2024, hardcover, 80 pages

published by Orange Regional Gallery and ANU Drill Hall Gallery

ISBN: 978-0-6457777-3-4

In Flux Euan Macleod presents a series of en plein air paintings made on Haupapa Tasman Glacier in New Zealand’s South Island, alongside a suite of studio works whose grand scale emulates their site of inspiration.

Macleod’s fascination with potentially dangerous environments recurs as he paints this sublime and inhospitable world of minerals, rock and ice. His climbers, often alone or linked by a rope to a companion figure or guide are metaphors through which the connection to and reliance on another human being is amplified.

The appearance of displaced or wandering figures is a hallmark of Macleod’s work, radically altering our reading of his paintings as ‘landscapes’. He invites us into a psychological space in which he turns to face his prevailing sense of disquiet. Macleod’s achievement might best align with the words of Scottish mountaineer and poet, Nan Shepherd, when she suggests that in mountain experience “place and mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered.”

Adjoining the glacier paintings are 200 works from an ongoing series Macleod has made of his friend Geoff Dixon. The portraits, created almost daily over the FaceTime app, began in 2021 during Covid lockdowns as a way of maintaining a connection with Geoff, who had recently lost his partner. The two continue to meet regularly with over 450 portraits to date.