///TODD MCKIE : PAINTING, SCULPTURE

Todd McKie is an artist who lives in Boston.  His seriously witty paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures have been shown in galleries and museums throughout the country and are included in many public and private collections.

"My work grows out of looking at other art, from living, and from lots of drawing. The sources include pre-Columbian, African, Eskimo, so-called primitive art, art by mental patients, untrained artists, and children.

The work looks, I hope, spontaneous. However, it ain't that easy being simple; that's where the drawing comes in. The drawings are made with pen or pencil on cheap paper and function as visual notes to myself, notes that can be altered as I move from idea to execution. Because I also make sculpture and prints, the ideas used in those other mediums find their way, inevitably, into the paintings. Bodies, chairs, flowers, animals, birds, and trees are some of the many images, constantly refigured, that I love to make. Travel influences my work, too; places I've been, people I've met, meals I've eaten, all may appear in the paintings.

Despite the preparatory drawings, when I begin a painting I try to have a direct response to what's happening on the canvas. I try to be open to the happy accident when it comes along. It's often difficult to know as I work just where an image comes from, what it's about. Months or years later, though, I'll realize, Oh, yeah, that was about that trip to France when it rained for three weeks, or an amazing fresco in a dimly-lit Italian church, or that time I hurt my knee.

It's a strange and glorious stew. I try to make the most beautiful, mysterious, most colorful, funniest, truest paintings I can. Every once in awhile, I succeed."

toddmckie@comcast.net