ArtistsNetwork.com 71for showing him the desolation. Sometimes a moment of
clarity will strike straight through him, “like an instantly
fading dream,” he says.
Springsteen’s importance is key, because McIntosh is
always trying to achieve a balance between capturing the
essence of a building without faithfully reproducing it.
“Bruce never quite takes you to the extreme, without draw-
ing you back in a really human way,” he says. “A painting
should do the same, give you a balance. It shouldn’t be just
horrible. It has to be horrible, and then it has to be a little
bit nicer, a little bit interesting and something different.”
Figures don’t appear in the artist’s landscapes, a deci-
sion that echoes back to McIntosh’s first approach to a
gallery. He was told, “Your paintings lack life.” At the time,
he thought, “Oh well,” but 10 years on, he decided to roll
with it. “I think it hurt at the time,” he says, “but with
hindsight he [the gallery owner] might have had a point.
I quite like the idea of an apocalyptic sort of vision, and
carrying on from Bosch or someone like that.”
Go Big for Impact
McIntosh is currently working on three large-scale paint-
ings—appoximately 3½ to 5x6½ feet. He relishes the
opportunity to go big, claiming that size affects impact.
“I’m really buoyed by these paintings, but you could proba-
bly find me saying that every time I start a project,” he
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST,
VISIT MACKIE–ART.COM.says. “The brief for these comes from a gallery that’s host-
ing a group show with two other artists. The request is for
the paintings to say something about horror and beauty.”
McIntosh’s painting of the Portuguese factory, men-
tioned earlier, was created for the show, and the artist is
struggling with how to direct the narrative. “I’m positive
that I want a statue of Poseidon in it, but I don’t know
what to paint with it,” he says. “I might have a Jeff Koons’
Popeye. There’s lots of strangeness going on. I’m torn.”
He also finds the Greek gods to be of interest. “As pious
and nice as they were, they were also horrible,” he says. “As
for Popeye, he was like this sort of demigod who acted as
Olive’s protector, but there was definitely something wrong
with him. There’s a cultural division between the earliest
example of representational art in a statue of Poseidon and
this glitzy Jeff Koons’ sculpture of Popeye. I quite like the
contrast between a celebrity versus ancient craft.” A doll-
house shared by Poseidon and Popeye? It’s this contrast
of unexpected invention and unpredictability set against
a natural, real-world backdrop that leaves viewers unsettled,
perhapsdisturbedand,inmanycases,spellbound.London-based Louella Miles (writers4management.com)
is a writer, publisher and an “artist in any spare time.”