ARTIST STATEMENT

When I paint, my mind is not in the world of my studio with brushes, paints, pencils and mixing jars, it is in the world of my subject. My subject material is the New Brunswick landscape; it's people and buildings. These are the things I have lived with all of my life and to which I feel a very strong emotional closeness.

I use the beautifully sensitive egg tempera painting medium for the more detailed or refined images and I use watercolours when I need something looser and more spontaneous. These two different painting mediums seem to complement my temperament, are a refreshing change from each other, and give me the freedom to stretch out in any direction that I choose.  

Throughout my career I have focused on creating artwork rather than creating an image of the artist. I belong to only one artist's group (The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts) and never allow political issues to interfere in the realm of my art making. I have very rarely applied for grants or artistic positions and I find this type of activity distracting from what I want to accomplish.

I have painted, what must look like to the casual observer, the same fields, trees, rocks, buildings and skies for over thirty years. Yet I always hope and strive for, that bit of extra insight and talent that will render my feelings and emotions for these things just perfectly.

David McKay, RCA

Born in Barkers Point on the Naskwaak River, David McKay has lived in New Brunswick all his life and he rarely travels. His first exhibition was in 1971 and was such a success that he gave up his job as a structural engineering technician to pursue art professionally. That he was entirely self-trained was an added measure of the artist's potential.

For the past thirty-five years, therefore, David McKay has been exploring and developing the subject matter that has interested him since his early success. He began working in watercolour and acrylic but very quickly discovered that he was most attracted to egg tempera paintings. There was an element of the smoothness in the linear, layered paint that made the paintings so interesting to David. For a while he worked in acrylic using tempera painting techniques. Thinned-down acrylic shares some of the qualities of the egg-yolk based paint but tempera has a transparency that acrylic can never approximate. So, by the late seventies, David took the final step into the involved world of tempera, preparing his own paints from selected pigments, distilled water and egg yolks. Thousands of eggs later and David has not touched acrylic again.

In tempera paintings, myriads of tiny brushstrokes layer together, each one revealing something of the colours beneath. When the paint hardens into a uniform surface, the painting glows as light plays off each translucent brushstroke. This technique has been admired for its inner radiance for centuries and due to the stability and durability of the paint examples from the 1st century AD are still extant.

David balances the labour and patience demands of tempera with the relaxed and forgiving watercolour technique. The two media are so different that one offers perfect alternatives to the other – and yet all David's paintings are united by their vision and their subtle, layered composition.

The long traditions of watercolour and tempera do not lessen the contemporary impact of David McKay's paintings. He applies a constantly developing eye to the ageless beauty to be found in New Brunswick . The vigour and drama of nature – silhouetted trees, loose grasses, hillsides, dynamic skies and calm waters – is balanced with studies of rural architecture. David paints what he likes to look at, and the manmade surfaces placed in nature have fascinated his eye for years. Recently the human figure has returned to his paintings and with it a narrative has been introduced to the calm images.

The textures David paints into his environment, whether a weathered barn's clapboards, a rolling cloudy sky, or the brick of a chimney, are the marks of a high level of sensitivity and perception. The stillness of solitude found in the country defines Mckay's oeuvre. The trees, skies and reflections, the barns, smoke and figures all distill New Brunswick into colourful and introspective paintings.

David McKay has had numerous solo exhibitions and has taken part in some very prestigious group exhibitions – including one with the National Gallery. David was the subject of a Bravo documentary and his art represented Canada at the Montreal Olympics, at the Centre de Culture in Paris and a painting was commissioned and reproduced for an edition of the phone book. David's paintings are featured in the significant private collections of New Brunswick and he has a painting in the collection of HRH Prince Andrew.