WILL McLEOD
Will McLeod is a multidisciplinary artist that specializes in puzzling machine sewn textiles, and painting and drawing. His paintings and drawings are psychedelic, reactive, and intentional. The fabric pieces are compositionally derived from those 2-D works. The textiles are homages to his spontaneous style and are created with a pattern maker’s eye via a precise paint-by-numbers style development. All McLeod’s compositions are a bit alien and abstract but have a connectivity that grounds their weirdness.
Will’s work has been shown in the New York upstate area at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Hudson Hall Opera House, The Fireplace Project, Hands on Main Gallery, Turley Gallery, Circle 46 Gallery, D’Arcy Simpson Gallery, Prattsville Art Center, Joyce Goldstein Gallery, ArtSee, ArtPort Kingston, Incident Report, Art Austerlitz, and others, and his art has been displayed at New York Fashion Week.
Notably, in addition to his own practice, McLeod has directed and acted in film-maker Mark Allen’s films, sewn many of artist Meg Lipke’s slumpy, stuffed paintings, and has designed dresses for FLOTUS Michelle Obama when working for fashion designer Tanya Taylor.
Artist Statement
I am an artist that works mainly in two mediums and two ways to express my aesthetic of bold and colorful yet blanked out shape-play.
I mainly work with mixed media on paper and canvas (sketches and paintings) and sewn textile iterations of those 2-D works.
I work in an intuitive almost trance state when I sketch and paint. I let my mood + my materials dictate the composition. I hone in on the dance of what feels physically good coming out of my hands and how those results work and look scattered and looped around on the canvas. I want blank space so that my notations pop and have more room to be considered. I employ degrading and whirlpooling shading, childlike circus-y curves, precise scratchy lines, and bright vs. neutral color planes as an elusive cast of characters in my visual language.
I work in a fully designed way when I create my textiles. I objectify and mirror the mixed media 2-D studies with math and a planned palette, into a larger than life, paint by numbers rendition. I was a fashion designer with a career in product development for 10 years so design and cloth are natural processes and materials in which I use to express myself.
I like all my compositions to be a bit cryptic, but I give breadcrumbs of storytelling and association. The forms and treatments are constantly connecting and disconnecting within evolving and devolving boundaries. Is an outline holding that form in, or is the arrangement free? The apparent motifs and shapes when not purely geometric, exhibit jagged violence, poking sexuality, and cutesy allusions to hand holding and love. My pieces are amalgamations of near meaning that you can almost put your finger on.