THE OTHER SIDE: MAGICIAN

Artist: Elizabeth McQueen

Medium: Mixed media

21.13" x 21"

Elizabeth McQueen has been a painter, printmaker, photographer, and arts educator for over forty years. Whether capturing reflections on the journey to her northern studio, southwest of North Bay or responding to seasons passing around her ‘winter retreat’ outside of Dundas Ontario, her painterly work has always been about the bones of the land.  

Sometimes, man’s interface with nature - as steel cuts through rock passes - provides the underpinnings of her work. At other moments, it is the energy of ever-changing light in skies and water that bring form to her emotionally charged strokes on canvas. 

In most recent works, she skates the edges in a style that might best be described as abstract realism. That they are landscape is unmistakable, but there is so much more expressive depth that one begins to realize perhaps inner topographies are also finding their way to the surface. 

McQueen’s work is inevitably about spirit, wonder and love for this magnificent land. Moments in time and light are captured and then reframed as meditations… sometimes tumultuous ...sometimes serene... but always with an eye on the horizon and what might next be revealed. 

Artist’s Statement 
I tend to begin working on a show with a series of ‘meditations in paint’ that are deliberately non-objective, often with my nondominant hand as I ‘push paint’ around an empty canvas. The inherent meaning is always elusive until much later and one must just sit with the disquiet until that meaning reveals itself. 

This was one of the first pieces that emerged from the initial lockdown, last March, but it wasn’t until almost a year later that I was able to tease out some of the clues to which the image alludes. 

That it is energetic and hopeful quickly becomes apparent, but the layering also reveals a darker beginning. Within archetypes, it is the Magician who has the ability to work with the alchemy of the mysteries to transform and that is apparently what this piece invoked. We will transform and there will be another side! 

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