Artist Statement 2007 After reflecting on the topics and themes in my recent paintings, I came to think of them as generally dealing with discourses, or languages, that have been in the ascendant at some point within my lifetime or that, at least, have made a profound mark on my own interaction with the world around me. Some paintings deal with languages of development and economic growth that result in areas of land lost to agglomeration ("Footprint" and "Transformer") and others with the persistence of militarism and 'security' mentalities, ever evolving as technologies and contexts allow ("Blackwater", "Unmanned," "Strategies," and "Chatter"). A group of paintings act as counterpoints to these more destructive discourses, emphasizing, for example, various quests for ways of living that emphasize human connection and solidarity ("Breaking Apart" and "Everdanger"), including forms of belonging that come with urbanization ("Night Market" and "Platforms"), the rise of cyber sociality ("Tag Clouds"), and spiritualities that resist dogmatic fundamentalisms and embrace, however obliquely, oneness with nature ("Tree of Life"' "Unfinished Cathedral" and "Tamarack"). All this said, ultimately my work operates first and foremost on an aesthetic level, with substantive themes being hinted at but never dominating the overall visual impact I seek to achieve with my approach to abstraction. For the most part the pieces are created using a wet on wet process. I work on many canvases at the same time, which results in an alloying of the subjects that are preoccupying me in a given period and in the formation of connections and oppositions amongst the works. Surface texture, depth of paint, and shadows work into the movement of colour and shape. The images created are a freeze's of objects, landscapes, and people in motion. Relationships we form in our minds by experiencing the objects set out on the grid varying in densities complete the canvas. In my paintings I am creating both a reaction and reflection to my surroundings and experience. The process involves under-painting layers of structure, grids, and interacting strings tying form together, like communication lines between the individual objects. Application of paint in opaque masses is a representation of our textured physical reality. Primarliy using the palette knife to reveal layers built up and exposed like a building cut away from a city block. Christian McLeod, April 2007

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