Laurie MacFayden
Edmonton, Alberta
I’m a poet and painter who’s endlessly fascinated with the visual arts.
Largely self-taught, I discovered watercolours and acrylics in high school, but set the palette aside for two decades while pursuing a career in print journalism. In the mid-1990s I rediscovered my passion for throwing paint around.
Growing up in Barrie, Ont., I was keenly influenced by hikes through the woodlands and marshes of Simcoe County with my father Clifford, a painter and avid birdwatcher, as well as family outings to the AGO in Toronto and the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, Ont. Works by Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro and Mark Rothko make me feel great and small at the same time.
I work mostly in acrylics, and my landscape style might be described as "Impressionism meets the Group of Seven." I’ve been told there’s a joyous, unfettered quality to my work that borders on reckless abandon; it pleases me to hear that because I never was very good at staying inside the lines.
Da Capo is a musical term that means “return to the beginning.”
Da Capo: Scenes from a Raw Palette, assembled for the Gallery at Milner, features two pieces — Sun Blaze and Minesing Swamp — that go back 30 years to my own beginnings: high school art class. The signature piece, Da Capo (acrylic on canvas, 56” x 44,” 2005), invokes a return to source, cosmos, womb; to the divine spark that feeds the creative energy in us all.
“The whole point of making art is to touch the heart.
It should have breath and a pulse.
Whether it invokes feelings of joy, love, beauty,
sorrow, despair, even moral outrage ...
art should make you feel something.”
fennel@shecode.com
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