The Art of the Unexplained
A deserted caravan in a vast Highland landscape, an abandoned building concealing an unexpected world or an unexplained celestial glow illuminating a remote glen. The paintings of Scottish artist Andrew McIntosh, also known as Mackie, inhabit a world somewhere between the familiar and the extraordinary, combining the drama of Romantic landscape painting with magical realism, dark humour and an unmistakable sense of mystery.
Born in Grantown-on-Spey in the Scottish Highlands in 1979 and now based in London, McIntosh draws upon the landscape of his childhood, capturing its dramatic scale and atmosphere in a tradition that recalls painters such as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt. Yet his landscapes are far from conventional. Strange electrical manifestations, isolated caravans and dilapidated structures interrupt the wilderness, while buildings with missing walls reveal incongruous interiors and miniature reproductions of celebrated works of art. These carefully constructed scenes have the atmosphere of Highland gothic mysteries, creating a distinctive form of contemporary Scottish noir.
McIntosh studied at Edinburgh’s Telford College before holding his first solo exhibition at the Highland Mori museum in 2001. Since then, he has exhibited widely across the UK, including at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and James Freeman Gallery in London. In 2014, he won the Towry Award for Best in Show at the National Open Art Competition at Somerset House and was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize. His work is held in several private and corporate collections.
Underlying these imagined worlds is McIntosh’s fascination with the technical possibilities of painting and his willingness to embrace mistakes, experimentation and unexpected discoveries. More recently, his work has ventured beneath the surface of the landscape, exploring mysterious glowing forms, underground environments and the imagined communication between trees. Ahead of his participation in Aurora Arborealis at James Freeman Gallery in November, McIntosh discusses the unlikely origins of his paintings, his relationship with art history and his enduring interest in creating worlds that leave their stories tantalisingly unresolved.
Your paintings often place isolated buildings within landscapes that feel slightly unsettling or mysterious. What first drew you to that kind of setting?
I think to explain that I have to go back quite a long way. I’d spent about ten years painting observed landscapes, essentially teaching myself how to paint, moving through watercolour, ink and eventually oils. During that time, I became increasingly fascinated by techniques I’d discover almost by accident. I started deliberately introducing errors into the process, hoping to accelerate those discoveries.
Alongside this, I embarked on a three-year project of monochromatic paintings depicting rather dark social environments. Everything was invented, from the characters to the architecture. I was learning whatever I needed to construct these worlds, including architectural software that allowed me to design elaborate underground spaces, enormous strip clubs with impossibly high ceilings and bizarre casinos.
Around this time, a friend, Linna, gave me some Sylvanian Families rabbits for my son, who was far too young for them. They ended up scattered around my room until I began considering painting them in the dramatic chiaroscuro style of Caravaggio. I even had them professionally photographed with the appropriate lighting.
But something wasn’t right. I have to feel completely convinced by an idea before I can paint it, and the rabbits felt like a cheap trick. I spent about six months trying to make them work, eventually placing them in settings borrowed from cinematic horror, such as the Bates Motel and The Shining. Still, I couldn’t quite believe in them.
I’d accumulated an enormous amount of visual material without finding a project I wanted to pursue. Then, one night, I woke up with a sudden thought: remove the rabbits.
Immediately, everything made sense. The abandoned dollhouses were far more interesting without their inhabitants. They had a strange atmosphere of their own.
Initially, I designed a large barn with multiple rooms and a hinged wall that opened to reveal the interior. It became rather complicated and visually awkward, so I began experimenting with caravans instead. They were small enough to make the idea manageable.
That was really the beginning: an abandoned dollhouse caravan, isolated in a landscape, with something of the atmosphere of a cinematic horror film. It wasn’t so much that I set out to paint mysterious buildings. I’d spent years developing the ingredients, and eventually found that the most interesting thing I could do was take something away.
There is often a strong sense that something has happened just before, or is about to happen, in your work. Do you think of your paintings as fragments of a larger story?
Yes, although I’m not entirely sure what that story is myself.
I like paintings that suggest something without explaining it. I think the viewer is quite capable of inventing a better story than anything I could provide. The moment you explain exactly what’s happening, you remove quite a lot of what makes the painting interesting.
I also like to make the journey into a painting slightly difficult. Compositionally, I often try to obstruct the entrance to the narrative, so the viewer has to work a little harder to find their way in. I don’t particularly want the painting to reveal itself immediately. There’s something more rewarding about having to navigate your way through it.
There is a sort of internal logic to the paintings, though. One idea tends to lead to another, and things that appear in one painting might reappear years later in a completely different setting. So perhaps there is a larger story developing, but I’m discovering it at roughly the same pace as everyone else.
You frequently place famous works of art or cultural references inside abandoned or unexpected spaces. What interests you about bringing those two worlds together?
Initially, they were almost a throwaway idea. I was painting a dollhouse interior and decided to position a Madonna amongst the plastic furniture. There wasn’t any grand conceptual intention behind it. I think the decision came from my fascination with making discoveries through seemingly bad ideas, or exploring possibilities that aren’t immediately obvious. Sometimes placing two things together that have absolutely no business being near one another produces something far more interesting than a carefully considered decision.
There’s something inherently funny about the contrast. A painting that might be treated with extraordinary reverence in a museum suddenly becomes part of the furnishings of a rather shabby little room.
But as the idea developed, I became interested in the way important works of art can disappear into private collections, sometimes effectively vanishing from public view. There’s something rather peculiar about an object that might have such enormous cultural significance becoming the private possession of one individual.
I suppose there’s a broader commentary on the human desire to own things, particularly things that are considered important or irreplaceable. The idea that someone can possess a piece of our collective cultural history is quite strange when you think about it.
I like that the paintings can operate on both levels. There’s the immediate absurdity of a masterpiece hanging amongst plastic furniture, but also something a little more uncomfortable about how we assign value to objects and what happens to them once someone decides they belong to them.
Some of your earlier paintings explored rivalries and tensions between major artists such as Bacon, Freud, Hockney and Hirst. What appealed to you about using art history as material for your own work?
I was interested in developing a project about feuds, particularly the role the media plays in creating and perpetuating them. How something fairly innocuous can be transformed through gossip, hearsay and speculation into a much larger conflict, often bearing little resemblance to whatever happened in the first place.
The art world seemed a particularly interesting place to explore this, with its larger-than-life personalities, competing reputations and the enormous importance attached to individual opinions.
At the same time, I was really enjoying the technical challenge of reproducing famous masterpieces at an almost ridiculous scale, sometimes no bigger than a 50p piece. One of my favourite challenges was painting Lucian Freud’s Standing by the Rags. I must have painted it about twenty times before I was satisfied. Eventually, I tried using Cremnitz white, the lead white pigment Freud himself was famous for using. I hadn’t imagined it would make any difference at such a tiny scale, but its particular elasticity and opacity turned out to be exactly what I needed to reproduce a miniature Freud.
So the project brought together two interests: the peculiar way reputations and rivalries are constructed, and my own fascination with the possibilities and limitations of paint.
Your buildings can feel almost like characters in their own right. Do you choose them mainly for their architecture, their history or simply because they create a particular mood?
I’m drawn to buildings that stand out, but not necessarily because they’re beautiful or architecturally impressive. I’m much more interested in buildings that create a sense of tension. There might be something awkward about their proportions, something uncomfortable about their design, or simply something about their appearance that feels slightly wrong.
I think a building can have an enormous amount of character without being particularly attractive. In fact, conventional beauty can sometimes make a building less interesting to me.
I’m interested in what happens when you place that architecture within a landscape. The relationship between the two can create an entirely different atmosphere, and a building that might seem peculiar in one setting can become something much more compelling in another.
Ultimately, I’m looking for something that creates a reaction rather than something that’s simply pleasing to look at.
Humour runs through the work, but it is often quite dry and sits alongside something darker. Is that contrast something you consciously look for?
I think anyone who knows me would attest to my fairly constant desire for daftness. I find absurdity enormously entertaining, particularly when it’s presented with complete seriousness.
That said, I’m quite reserved about making a painting that’s essentially a joke. Humour can be terribly fleeting. A joke can disappear into the wind almost as quickly as a political movement, and I don’t particularly want to spend months making something whose entire purpose might evaporate in a moment.
I think humour works better for me when it’s just one element of a painting, rather than its reason for existing. It can sit alongside something darker or more ambiguous without either one needing to dominate.
I’m much more interested in a painting that can shift in character as you spend time with it. Something might initially seem ridiculous, but the longer you look, the less certain you become about what you’re actually seeing.
Your paintings are very carefully constructed, yet the worlds you create are often strange or impossible. Do you enjoy that tension between technical precision and imagination?
I think the technical side of painting is enormously important to me. I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand what paint can do, and I suspect I’d still be discovering things if I had a hundred lifetimes to explore it.
There’s something particularly satisfying about using quite traditional painting techniques to describe something that couldn’t possibly exist. The more convincingly you can construct an imaginary world, the more freedom you have to introduce things that are completely absurd.
I enjoy the problem-solving involved. Every painting presents a slightly different set of technical challenges, and quite often the solution comes from experimenting with something I haven’t tried before. Sometimes deliberately making what seems like a bad decision can lead to a much more interesting discovery. I think that’s probably what keeps me painting. There’s always something I haven’t worked out yet.
Landscape has remained important throughout your practice. What does placing something within a remote or empty landscape allow you to say that a more populated setting would not?
I grew up in the Scottish Highlands, so enormous landscapes with very little human activity have always seemed quite normal to me. I think that inevitably influences the way I see the world.
There’s something wonderful about the scale of a landscape and how insignificant almost anything we build becomes within it. A small structure surrounded by mountains can appear rather absurd, but at the same time its presence can completely change how you experience the landscape.
I’m also interested in the freedom an empty landscape provides. Without people or the distractions of everyday life, the smallest intervention can take on an enormous significance. A single building or an unexpected light can become the focus of an entire world.
I don’t necessarily think of these places as lonely or threatening. Quite often, I find them comforting. There’s a particular kind of familiarity in being surrounded by very little, and perhaps that’s something I’ve carried with me from growing up in the Highlands.
More recent works introduce glowing, almost supernatural elements into otherwise familiar environments. Has your interest in mystery and the unexplained become stronger over time?
I think the paintings have certainly become stranger, although I’m not sure that reflects a growing interest in the supernatural.
It began with placing suns inside dollhouse interiors. I became interested in the possibility of the sun escaping from these enclosed spaces and began exploring what that might look like. At one point, I built a model caravan and set fire to it, partly to understand how the light and destruction might behave.
Eventually, the sun began to multiply into smaller glowing forms, which started appearing in landscapes. From there, they found their way into caves and underground environments, and more recently I’ve been exploring the idea of tree roots communicating, with those connections somehow becoming visible.
I’ve read a great deal of Cormac McCarthy over the years, and I suspect that’s shaped my thinking to some extent. The final monologue in No Country for Old Men is particularly interesting to me. Sheriff Bell describes a dream of his father riding ahead into the darkness carrying fire. It’s an extraordinarily powerful image, but its meaning remains unresolved. It suggests possibilities without insisting on an explanation.
I’m not particularly concerned with believing in the supernatural. I’m much more interested in the possibilities themselves, and the freedom to explore something without having to establish whether it’s real. I think that sense of uncertainty is something I enjoy in painting too.
Your work has appeared in very different contexts, from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition to the John Moores Painting Prize and gallery exhibitions. Is there a particular moment in your career that changed the way you viewed your own work?
Winning the National Open was a major moment for me, particularly being presented with the award by Antony Gormley. As an artist, you spend an extraordinary amount of time working alone, developing ideas and making decisions without necessarily knowing whether any of it is going to resonate with anyone else. To receive that kind of recognition was enormously encouraging.
But perhaps the moment I remember with the greatest sense of pride was my first solo exhibition, You Were Shit in the 80s. I was so proud of myself. There’s something extraordinary about seeing a whole body of work brought together for the first time, particularly when you’ve spent years developing the ideas and working towards that moment. It felt like a real achievement.
Being selected for the John Moores Painting Prize was another particularly meaningful moment, and I’ve been fortunate enough to exhibit in some wonderful places.
I think the moments that have most fundamentally changed how I view my work have often happened in the studio, though. Occasionally, you make a painting that opens up an entirely new direction, and suddenly you can see years of possibilities ahead of you.
Those discoveries tend to stay with me longer than any particular exhibition.
You have developed such a distinctive visual world over the years. How do you keep that world evolving without losing what makes the work recognisably yours?
I think artists inevitably develop a particular way of looking at things, and that tends to remain fairly consistent even when the subject matter changes. I’m not especially interested in protecting a recognisable style or deliberately trying to escape one.
These days, I happily jump back and forth between different projects. Sometimes I’m looking for a new direction, sometimes simply for something I want to paint, and occasionally for something that brings me a bit of comfort. I invented these worlds, so in a sense I feel I own them. They’re places I can return to whenever I like, and quite often revisiting an older idea will suggest something entirely new.
What’s important to me is that a project develops naturally. Every time I’ve tried to force the work in a particular direction, it’s failed. I’ve learnt to trust the process and allow ideas to develop at their own pace. Sometimes that means spending years exploring the same territory, and sometimes an unexpected discovery can send everything off in a completely different direction.
What is occupying your thoughts in the studio at the moment?
At the moment, I’m working towards an exhibition at James Freeman Gallery, Aurora Arborealis, opening on 19 November. I’m exploring several different ideas, moving between projects that have developed over quite a number of years.
I’ve become increasingly interested in what might be happening beneath the surface of the landscapes I’ve been painting. The glowing forms that originally appeared inside dollhouses have gradually made their way into mountains, caves and underground environments, and more recently I’ve been exploring the idea of communication between trees, with their root systems becoming part of the visual language of the paintings.
I’m also developing work involving vitrines, alongside my continuing fascination with peculiar buildings and their relationship to enormous landscapes.
I tend to work on several projects simultaneously, moving between them depending on what interests me at the time. I’m never entirely sure which one will lead somewhere unexpected, and that’s probably the most enjoyable part of being in the studio.
Instagram: @andrewmcintosh_mackie
