Euan Macleod: The Painter in the Painting

Macleod paints from the core of his being, taking us into innermost regions of the human condition. His works explore states of youth and aging, the relationship between human body and environment, and the processes of memory and forgetting which shape both people and places. Writer Gregory O'Brien looks at the origins of these works in the artist's life, and in the many strands of Australasian art and history which have shaped them. He explores the ways Macleod has increasingly come to inhabit these tempestuous yet strangely luminous canvases. Since his arrival in Sydney from Christchurch in 1981, Macleod's development has been parallelled by the progress - within the paintings themselves - of a lone figure traversing land, sea and sky. This figure is at once Everyman and he is the painter himself. Macleod's canvases are both an awakening and a laying to rest of ghosts. Like Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy, the walking figure leads the viewer towards new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.