Small Pleasures

"My work could be seen as diaristic, as it is often based on things I have seen. Subjects are chosen instinctively, close friends and family, actors in films and strangers only glimpsed in bars or on beaches are first of all drawn, either from observation or memory, or found in and drawn from films.

I am drawn to the romantic, the clichéd, the use and exploration of stereotypes or archetypes, the play of light and shadow and opportunities for visual trickery such as mirrors and reflections. I am particularly drawn to drawing women. Aware that the male gaze has deeply influenced how I and society expect women to look and behave, I paint myself and other women in examination of the female experience, female friendship, my own relationship to womanhood and my received concept of femininity. I also am fascinated by the relationship between the gaze of the viewer and the gaze of the subject of a painting. I often want the viewer to be able to look the painted subject in the eye and for the painted subject to be able to meet the viewers gaze. The idea that they know that they are inside a painting, and that they are being looked at, and the idea that through this meeting of eyes you have the potential to look across a great chasm of time or space.

In one way the drawings are simply vehicles to explore image making, the drawings a framework inside of which I can play with paint, its tactile, textural and analogue qualities, and all the ways it can be applied. The paintings are part of an ongoing experiment investigating how to construct an image, considering colour, pattern and texture, as well as space and form. In another way, the images are a personal record of my own observations and interior thoughts/emotions.

But I also want the viewer to be able to connect with the images, drawn in by their imagination, curiosity and empathy, to consider any person, narrative or question presented in the painting. I hope there is a certain amount of universality in the paintings. I read widely, books spanning a range of times and geographical areas – from Jane Austen to Ali Smith to Chimamanda Ngozi. Books alongside cinema and song lyrics, influence my work, I am interested in how characters are represented and the universality of basic human emotions. I think broadly, the paintings seek to contemplate what it is to be human, the ways we behave and interact, our relationships, our interior thoughts and feelings and the endurance of human emotion through out history." - Alice Macdonald, 2021

Alice Macdonald is an artist living in London. Primarily working in painting her practice also includes printmaking, ceramics and installations made in collaboration with Mark Connolly. 

Accolades 

Education: Falmouth University 2011- 14. Royal Drawing School 2016-17. 

Residencies:Rhode Island School of Design, USA, and a teaching residency at The Institute of Fine Arts, India.  

@alice__mac
www.alicemacdonald.co.uk