Art2App Collection Manager

Erin MacLeod

A Retrospective 2016-2025

Erin MacLeod

A Retrospective 2016-2025

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ERIN MACLEOD: CITY STREETS, WATERFRONTS &1

OPEN COUNTRY

STILL LIFE & WINDOWS 30

WATERFRONTS 36

INDEX 48

ERIN MACLEOD: CITY STREETS, WATERFRONTS & OPEN COUNTRY

Erin MacLeod was born in Halifax in 1979 and spent a decade working as a graphic designer before leaving in 2014 to paint full time. The habit of filling sketchbooks on weekends and holidays had been with her since her early twenties, and travel has remained at the centre of her practice. Each year she spends four to six weeks moving between a handful of cities and landscapes, drawing in ink and watercolour on the spot, then returns to her Halifax studio to build larger oils from those notes and photographs.

She works in three distinct registers. The oils on canvas are constructed from sketches over several weeks, accumulating layers until the light settles where she wants it. The watercolours are made mostly on site and kept deliberately loose. The ink and wash drawings come straight from her sketchbooks, with bare paper left exposed as a considered element of the composition. Across all three, the recurring subjects are narrow streets, harbour edges, evening light, and the figures who happen to inhabit them.

The work gathered here spans five series. "City Streets" accounts for a large portion of the paintings, and its range is considerable: a yellow tram turning under the twin towers of the Lisbon cathedral, gabled houses around a Frankfurt square under a broken sky, a traveller disappearing into a lane barely wider than her shoulders. What connects these scenes is less geography than a shared quality of attention, a willingness to wait for the moment when ordinary architecture becomes luminous.

The waterfront paintings extend that concern with transient light onto water, where it grows still less stable. The lamps of the Pont Alexandre III come on one by one under a purple sky. A gondola moves through a canal so narrow the ochre walls seem to lean inward. At Manarola, a palette knife drags across the rooftops while the sea sits below in flat, cold bands. These are paintings about the edge between land and water, which is also, in MacLeod's hands, a threshold between the familiar and the open.

The open country works move at a different pace. An empty bench in October light, a white chapel behind a wooden footbridge, purple lupins on a dark hillside with a stone church waiting on the horizon. The stillness here is not emptiness but something closer to a held breath. The dark foreground of the autumn park bench, glazed in several layers, gives the painting a depth that rewards time spent before it.

MacLeod has shown at the Lunenburg Art Gallery, held a solo exhibition at Gallery on Pleasant in 2023, and her paintings are held in private collections in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Collecting her work over time reveals something a survey exhibition cannot easily offer. The repeated choices become visible, the obsessions clarify, and what first appeared to be a preference for certain subjects discloses itself as a sustained inquiry into what paint can do with fading light. This catalogue follows that inquiry from one canvas to the next.

ERIN MACLEOD

b. 2079

Born 1979 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lives and works in Halifax.

Erin MacLeod grew up in Halifax and worked for ten years as a graphic designer at a regional publisher before leaving in 2014 to paint full time. She had been filling sketchbooks on weekends and holidays since her early twenties, and travel has stayed at the centre of her work: every year she spends four to six weeks in a few cities and landscapes, drawing in ink and watercolour on the spot, then paints larger oils from those sketches back in her Halifax studio.

She works in three modes. The oils on canvas are built from sketches and photographs and finished over several weeks. The watercolours are made mostly on site and left loose. The ink and wash drawings come straight from her sketchbooks, with large areas of bare paper left on purpose. She likes narrow streets, harbour edges, evening light and the people who happen to be in it.

Her work falls into five series: "Sketchbook Cities" (ink and watercolour drawings, since 2019), "City Streets" (street scenes, since 2018), "Waterfronts" (harbours, canals and sea, since 2016), "Open Country" (landscapes, since 2019) and "Still Life & Windows" (quiet interiors, since 2021).

She has shown at the Lunenburg Art Gallery summer show (2016 to 2020), had a solo exhibition at Gallery on Pleasant in Lunenburg (2023) and taken part in several group shows across Nova Scotia. Her paintings are held in private collections in Canada, the United States and the UK.

CITY STREETS

A grouping centred on the life and atmosphere of urban streets, drawn together through works such as "Tram Below the Sé, Lisbon", "Two Trams, Lisbon", "Half-Timbered Square, Frankfurt" and "Narrow Street at Dusk". The pieces move between specific cities and more anonymous corners of the old European town, finding their subject in cobblestones and tram lines, lantern light and fading sun.

Several works return to the quieter, more intimate register: "The Walker, Narrow Lane", "Old Town Street, Evening" and "Lantern on the Night Wall" all suggest the city at a particular hour, when foot traffic thins and architecture reasserts itself. Others, like "Red Awnings, Sunny Corner" and "Terracotta Street at Sunset", lean into warmth and colour, catching the street in a more generous light. Together they trace a sustained interest in the urban fabric as a place of mood and passage rather than spectacle.

Narrow Street at Dusk

2018

An oil on canvas of modest but deliberate scale, 20 by 30 inches, painted in 2018 from a sketch made at six in the evening. The title and the curator's note together fix the moment precisely: that brief interval when daylight has not quite gone and artificial light has not yet taken over, and the street belongs to neither.

Figures move away from the viewer down a damp street, their backs turned, absorbed into the scene rather than presented to it. The red walls that flank them are described as going dark, which suggests the palette works through deepening rather than contrast, the warmth of the masonry surrendering to the blue-grey of dusk rather than fighting it. Wetness on the street would carry whatever light remains, offering a faint luminosity underfoot even as the walls close down.

The composition, with its receding figures and narrowing perspective, draws attention inward and forward simultaneously, the eye following the figures while the architecture compresses the space around them. Painted from a direct observational sketch, the work carries the particular quality of something caught rather than constructed.

20x30 in

Terracotta Street at Sunset

2018

An oil on canvas of 24 by 30 inches, painted in 2018, depicting a narrow street at the close of day. The title points to terracotta as the dominant material of the architecture, and the existing notes confirm the scene: brick towers and shuttered facades lit by the last of the sun, a pink sky settling over the lane.

Sunset light on old masonry is a subject with a long tradition in European and Mediterranean painting, and the palette implied here, warm terracotta against a cooling pink sky, sets up the kind of tonal contrast that gives such compositions their particular stillness. The shutters suggest a southern or Mediterranean vernacular, the street narrow enough that the buildings frame the sky rather than open onto it, drawing the eye upward toward the fading light.

24x30 in

Old Town Street, Evening

2020

An oil on canvas depicting a cobbled old-town street at evening, with low raking light falling across the stonework and a horse-drawn carriage receding into the distance along the lane. The composition draws the eye down the street through the play of warm light against the cooler shadows gathering at the far end, giving the scene a quiet, suspended quality. Signed lower right. Painted in 2020, on a canvas measuring 20 by 30 inches.

20x30 in

Lantern on the Night Wall

2020

A 2020 oil on canvas, 18 by 24 inches, built around the tension between two competing light sources: the warm orange cast of a single iron lantern and the cool teal that settles over the surrounding street and stonework. The composition isolates the lantern as the sole generator of warmth, letting its glow pool against the wall in a way that makes the surrounding darkness feel deliberate rather than incidental.

The palette is spare but purposeful. Teal and orange sit at near-complementary positions on the colour wheel, and the contrast between them gives the scene its charge without requiring any additional incident. The stone wall becomes the painting's primary surface, a field on which the lantern's light performs, and the texture of the masonry presumably gives the oil medium something to work with in terms of impasto or layered glazing to suggest depth and roughness.

The subject belongs to a long tradition of nocturne painting, from the gas-lit streets of the Impressionists to the quieter, more introspective urban scenes of the twentieth century, though the particular colour temperature here reads as a contemporary choice, more saturated and graphic than a strictly naturalistic rendering would allow. The iron lantern as a motif carries its own weight: functional, old-world, a point of human-made light held against the indifferent dark of the street.

18x24 in

The Walker, Narrow Lane

2021

An oil on canvas of modest, intimate proportions (16 x 24 inches), painted in 2021. The subject is a solitary figure, a woman carrying a backpack, caught at the moment of entering a lane so narrow it seems to close around her. The vertical format suits the composition well: the lane's confining walls draw the eye forward and downward, compressing the space and lending the scene a quality of quiet absorption. The figure is defined more by posture and silhouette than by detail, which places the emphasis on the act of walking itself, on forward motion and the particular solitude of a traveller who has chosen a path that offers no wide view, only the next few steps ahead.

The title, "The Walker, Narrow Lane", is plainly descriptive yet carries a certain weight. There is something deliberate in naming both the person and the place so simply, as though each is defined by the other. The lane is narrow because she is in it; she is a walker because the lane demands nothing else of her.

16x24 in

Tram Below the Sé, Lisbon

2022

An oil on canvas completed in 2022, measuring 24 by 36 inches, depicting one of Lisbon's iconic yellow trams as it rounds the curve beneath the twin Romanesque towers of the Sé cathedral. The subject places the composition at one of the city's most recognizable junctions, where the everyday rhythm of the tram network passes directly in front of a structure begun in the twelfth century. That collision of the workaday and the ancient is the quiet tension the painting holds.

According to the curator's notes, the work was painted over six weeks in the studio rather than on location, which gives the piece a considered, distilled quality. Studio practice of this kind tends to compress observation into something more deliberate than plein-air work: the light, the geometry of the street, and the relationship between the tram's warm yellow body and the pale stone of the façade would all have been resolved through memory and reference rather than immediate sensation. The 24 by 36 inch format is a horizontal rectangle well suited to the subject, allowing the cathedral's towers to rise with authority while the tram occupies the lower register and carries the eye across the picture plane.

24x36 in

Half-Timbered Square, Frankfurt

2023

A contemporary oil on canvas depicting one of Frankfurt's half-timbered squares, painted in 2023. At 30 by 22 inches, the composition frames the characteristic steep gables and close-set timber-framed facades that define the reconstructed Altstadt quarter, with café awnings marking the human scale along the lower edge of the scene.

Frankfurt's old town was largely destroyed in 1944 and its celebrated Römerberg and surrounding streets rebuilt or restored across subsequent decades, with the most recent phase of reconstruction completed only in 2018. Painting this subject in 2023 means engaging with architecture that is simultaneously ancient in form and newly made, a tension that lends the motif an unusual quality: the picturesque is also, in a sense, a considered act of civic imagination. The broken sky above the gables introduces movement and atmosphere into what might otherwise read as a purely architectural study, pulling the scene toward something more contingent and felt.

30x22 in

Two Trams, Lisbon

2024

A watercolour on 300 gsm cold-pressed paper, painted in 2024, measuring 20 by 15 inches. The subject is a steep Lisbon street where two trams pass one another, their routes threading between facades clad in the azulejo tilework that has defined the city's visual character for centuries.

Lisbon's trams, particularly the narrow-gauge Carris lines that still climb the older hillside bairros, have long attracted painters drawn to the compression of the scene: the tight canyon of the street, the geometry of the tiled walls, and the yellow carriages negotiating gradients that most cities would have abandoned to cable or funicular. The moment of two trams crossing on such a slope concentrates all of that into a single, transient encounter.

Cold-pressed paper at 300 gsm offers enough tooth to hold layered washes without buckling, and at this scale the format gives the composition room to convey both the verticality of the street and the architectural detail of the facades. Watercolour is well suited to the subject: the medium's transparency allows light to read through the washes in a way that captures the particular quality of Atlantic light on glazed tile.

20x15 in

Red Awnings, Sunny Corner

2025

A plein-air watercolour painted in a single afternoon session, 'Red Awnings, Sunny Corner' captures a street corner at midday, the kind of subject that rewards speed and commitment in equal measure. The title announces its two organizing facts: the saturated red of the awnings and the quality of the light, which at that hour flattens shadow and intensifies colour simultaneously.

At 20 by 13 inches, the sheet is generous enough to hold architectural structure and passing figures without crowding either. Working on site in watercolour demands that decisions about wash, edge, and tone be made before the paper dries, and the result tends to carry a directness that studio work rarely replicates. The shoppers crossing in strong light bring movement and scale to what might otherwise read as a purely architectural study.

Painted in 2025, the work belongs to a long tradition of urban watercolour made directly from observation, where the constraints of time and medium become part of the composition's energy rather than obstacles to it.

20x13 in

OPEN COUNTRY

A gathering of landscape works in which open air and natural light are the consistent preoccupations. The pieces range across seasons and times of day, from a summer meadow under drifting clouds and lupins caught at dusk, to an autumn stream and a bench in a park as the leaves turn. Broader vistas appear as well, among them a castle on a loch and red rooftops seen across water, suggesting a sensibility drawn equally to the intimate corner and the expansive view. Together the works trace a quiet attentiveness to the countryside in its changing moods.

Bench in the Autumn Park

2019

A 2019 oil on canvas, 20 by 30 inches, depicting an empty park bench set beneath autumn trees. The subject is quiet and unhurried, belonging to a long tradition of the unoccupied seat as a vehicle for mood rather than narrative. The foreground is built up through multiple glazing layers, a technique that lends the darker passages a particular depth and luminosity, allowing light to seem to travel through the paint rather than simply sit on its surface. October light, with its low angle and warm, slightly melancholy quality, appears to be the governing condition of the whole composition.

20x30 in

Castle on the Loch

2019

An oil on canvas painted during a visit to the Scottish Highlands in 2019, depicting a stone castle on its island at low tide. The format (30 × 20 inches) suits the kind of direct observation that travel painting encourages.

The subject belongs to a long tradition of Highland landscape painting, where the interplay of water, rock, and sky has drawn artists since at least the Romantic period. The choice of low tide shifts the mood from the conventionally dramatic to something quieter and more grounded: the castle anchored to its exposed foreshore rather than floating on open water, the surrounding loch pulled back to reveal the geology beneath.

30x20 in

Yellow Meadow, Summer Clouds

2020

A landscape in oil on canvas, 16 by 24 inches, painted in 2020. The title and the curator's note place the composition in a green valley carpeted with buttercups, the viewpoint taken from a hillside sketch, with a generous expanse of summer sky filling the upper portion of the picture. The horizontal format suits the subject well, allowing the meadow to breathe across the canvas while the clouds command the space above. Oil on canvas is a natural choice for this kind of plein-air-derived work, lending itself to the layered warmth of yellow flowers against green grass and the shifting, luminous quality that summer cloud formations demand.

16x24 in

Chapel by the Stream, Autumn

2021

Oil on canvas, 30 × 20 inches, painted in 2021. A white-walled chapel sits behind a wooden footbridge, the stream beneath it running cold and fast. The vertical format suits the subject: the eye moves upward from the rushing water, across the bridge's weathered planks, and settles on the chapel's pale facade against what one imagines as an autumn canopy. The season implied by the title lends the composition a particular quality of light, the kind of thin, clear afternoon brightness that arrives after the leaves have begun to turn and the air has lost its warmth.

30x20 in

Red Roofs Across the Lake

2022

A 2022 watercolour on paper, square in format at 20 by 20 inches, depicting a guesthouse with a red roof whose reflection settles into the still surface of a lake below. Behind the building, a hillside of conifers in autumn colour rises to fill the upper portion of the composition, the warm tones of the season pressing down toward the cooler water. The square format suits the subject well, holding the reflection in close relation to the structure above it and giving the scene a self-contained, meditative quality that watercolour, with its translucency and soft edges, is particularly well placed to convey.

20x20 in

Lupins at Dusk

2023

An oil on canvas (30 × 20 inches), painted in 2023. The title places the scene at the threshold between day and night, a moment when colour deepens rather than fades: lupins, with their tall, densely packed flower spikes, lend themselves naturally to that last saturated purple before the light goes. The hillside setting and the stone church on the horizon suggest a northern or upland landscape, the kind of place where such wildflowers colonise roadsides and rough ground in early summer.

The composition sets a vertical rhythm in the foreground, the lupins rising against what one imagines as a darkening sky, while the church anchors the middle distance with the quiet authority of a long-established landmark. The pairing of wild, abundant growth with a solitary piece of architecture is a well-worn pastoral tension, but it remains effective: the cultivated and the untamed, the permanent and the seasonal, held in a single glance.

30x20 in

Autumn Stream

2024

A watercolour on paper, painted wet-in-wet with salt, depicting a stream moving through oak woodland in late October. The 24 × 14 inches format suits the subject well: the vertical orientation channels the eye downward along the water's course, echoing the way a narrow stream draws the gaze through a dense wood.

The wet-in-wet technique, combined with the use of salt to lift pigment while the wash is still damp, produces the soft, diffused edges and unpredictable blooms of tone that characterise the method. In autumn woodland, where light filters unevenly through thinning canopy and the ground is a patchwork of fallen leaves and shadow, these qualities feel particularly apt. Salt granules absorb moisture from the wet surface and leave behind pale, crystalline marks that can suggest the broken glitter of moving water or the irregular texture of leaf litter, depending on how the surrounding washes settle.

Painted in 2024.

24x14 in

SKETCHBOOK CITIES

The titles gathered here suggest a series of works depicting urban scenes across European cities, rendered in a sketchbook manner. Paris, Verona, Berlin and Venice each appear to contribute a subject, alongside what reads as a Central European old town square. The works move between grand civic monuments and quieter, more intimate corners: a gate, a bridge, a gondolier at a water entrance, an elderly figure on church steps, a shaded café terrace, a narrow alley with steps catching the light.

Taken together, the pieces form a kind of visual itinerary, less concerned with the postcard view than with the textures and rhythms of city life at a particular moment. Architecture provides the setting, but figures and details draw the eye toward the human scale of each place.

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

2019

A 2019 drawing in ink and watercolour wash on hot-pressed paper, 16 by 11 inches, made on the spot. The smooth surface of hot-pressed paper suits this kind of rapid, committed work: it takes ink cleanly and lets a wash move without the texture of a rougher sheet pulling at the brush.

The Brandenburg Gate is one of those subjects that resists easy handling. Its neoclassical weight, the twelve Doric columns, the Quadriga of Victory crowning the attic, the sheer familiarity of the silhouette, all of it can easily tip a quick study into postcard territory. Here the crowd is kept at a distance, reduced to dabs of blue that suggest mass and movement without resolving into individual figures. The decision keeps the architecture dominant while acknowledging that the Gate is never experienced in isolation, always framed by the life of the Pariser Platz around it.

Drawing standing up, in under an hour, imposes its own discipline. There is no time to second-guess the line or rework the wash, and the result carries the directness that comes from that constraint.

16x11 in

Gondolier at the Water Door

2019

Ink and watercolour wash on hot-pressed paper, drawn in Venice in 2019. The smooth surface of hot-pressed paper suits this combination of media well, allowing the ink line to stay crisp while the wash settles into flat, luminous pools rather than bleeding into the grain. The result is a quality common to the best plein-air work in this tradition: immediacy held in check by a degree of control.

The subject is a gondolier passing a water-level doorway, the kind of worn, salt-bleached threshold that punctuates the canal facades of Venice at intervals. Viewed from a small bridge, the composition places the figure in transit, caught between the architecture on either side rather than posed against it. At 9.0 by 14.0 inches the sheet is intimate, the scale of a sketchbook page kept as a finished study.

9x14 in

Ponte Pietra, Verona

2020

A vertical composition in ink and watercolour wash on hot-pressed paper, 16 by 11 inches, made in 2020. The subject is the Ponte Pietra in Verona, the oldest bridge in the city and one of the best-preserved Roman crossings in northern Italy, its distinctive alternating brick and stone arches spanning the Adige since the first century BC. Behind the bridge rises the campanile of Sant'Anastasia, the great Gothic church whose tower has anchored this particular view of Verona for centuries.

The decision to leave the river unpainted is the compositional key to the piece. The bare hot-pressed paper reads as water without depicting it, and the resulting luminosity pulls the eye upward into the worked areas of the drawing. Hot-pressed paper suits this approach well: its smooth, hard surface takes ink lines cleanly and allows watercolour wash to sit on top rather than sink in, preserving the crispness of the architectural detail while keeping the tonal washes transparent and controlled.

The pairing of ink line with wash is a long-established method for architectural subjects, and it suits the Ponte Pietra particularly well. The bridge's geometry, the rhythm of its arches, the texture of the stonework, and the vertical punctuation of the bell tower behind it all reward the kind of precise yet fluid handling that the combination allows.

16x11 in

Old Man on the Church Steps

2021

An ink and watercolour wash drawing on hot-pressed paper, executed in 2021 and measuring 11 by 16 inches. A solitary figure, an old man, makes his way up the steps toward a baroque gateway. He is rendered with enough detail to anchor the composition, while the architecture around him is left as bare, untouched paper, its presence implied rather than stated.

The restraint is deliberate and effective. Hot-pressed paper, with its smooth, hard surface, suits this kind of economy: washes sit cleanly on it, edges stay crisp, and the white of the sheet reads as light rather than absence. The decision to leave the gateway as void gives the figure an unusual weight. He is the only thing the artist chose to commit to, which makes his slow ascent feel considered, even charged.

The baroque setting, however lightly invoked, carries its own associations: grand ecclesiastical architecture built to impress and to dwarf the individual. Against that implied scale, the old man climbing alone becomes the subject in every sense.

11x16 in

Institut de France, Paris

2022

The Institut de France occupies one of the most composed positions in Paris, its hemicycle and drum dome closing the view across the Pont des Arts from the Louvre. Mazarin's college, completed by Louis Le Vau in 1688 and later home to the Académie française and its sister academies, has attracted draughtsmen to this particular vantage on the Left Bank quay for as long as the bridge has stood.

This 2022 drawing takes that classic station and works it in ink and watercolour wash on hot-pressed paper, a surface that rewards clean line and lets a dilute wash settle without bleeding. The palette is held to sepia throughout, with a single note of grey introduced to separate or anchor one passage of the composition. The restraint is deliberate: sepia wash has a long association with architectural drawing and with the kind of topographical work that treats a building as both subject and structure, and limiting the palette to near-monochrome keeps the eye on the geometry of Le Vau's façade rather than the atmosphere of the scene.

At 16 by 12 inches the sheet is large enough to carry the full colonnade and dome with room for the quay and the Seine in the foreground, giving the composition the proportions of a considered study rather than a rapid sketch.

16x12 in

Café Umbrellas, Old Town Square

2023

A street-level view of a small town square, rendered in ink and watercolour wash on hot-pressed paper. The title places the scene in an old town setting, with café umbrellas as the nominal subject, though the framing suggests the real interest lies in the interplay of architecture and light: a column, the shaded flank of a building, and the quiet geometry of outdoor seating on a morning that has not yet filled with people.

Hot-pressed paper suits this combination of media well. Its smooth surface allows ink lines to remain crisp and deliberate while still accepting the wash with enough control to build soft gradations of tone. The 16 by 11 inch format is intimate, closer to a sketchbook study than a formal composition, and that scale tends to reward the kind of direct, unhurried observation that urban scenes like this one invite.

Dated 2023, the work belongs to a long tradition of European townscape drawing in which the subject is less the landmark than the ordinary life gathered around it.

16x11 in

Orange Alley, Steps

2024

A small-format work in ink and watercolour wash on hot-pressed paper, made in 2024. The title places the scene in a hillside town, the kind of Mediterranean or hill-village alley where worn steps climb between close walls and the afternoon light catches the stonework at a sharp angle.

Hot-pressed paper suits this combination of media well: its smooth surface holds a clean ink line and lets the wash sit on top rather than sinking in, which keeps the colours luminous. The curator's note that the shaded wall is inked heavily so the orange can glow points to a deliberate tonal strategy, using the weight of the dark passages to make the warmer tones read with more intensity than the pigment alone would achieve. It is a technique with a long tradition in plein-air and travel drawing, where the goal is not photographic accuracy but the felt temperature of a place.

9x14 in

STILL LIFE & WINDOWS

A grouping that brings together two of painting's most enduring preoccupations: the arrangement of objects in interior light, and the view outward through glass onto the world beyond. Still life as a distinct genre took shape in the Low Countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though its roots reach back through medieval manuscript borders and Roman wall paintings to the decorated tombs of ancient Egypt. From the outset it carried a double charge, at once a record of the visible world rendered with careful attention and a vehicle for symbolic meaning, whether the vanitas skull, the seasonal flower, or the simple glass of water catching the light from a window.

The window itself occupies a curious position within this tradition. It is neither purely interior nor exterior, neither object nor view, but the threshold between the two. Painters have long understood it as a device for controlling light, framing the outside world as though it were itself a composition, and setting up a dialogue between the tangible things on a sill or table and the more elusive space beyond the pane.

The works gathered here reflect both sides of that dialogue. Bottles catching the warmth of goldenrod, peonies arranged in a grey jug, white flowers suffused with window light, and a rooftop vista seen from within a room all speak to the same sustained interest in how ordinary things hold and transform the light around them.

White Flowers, Window Light

2021

An oil on canvas of modest, intimate scale (13 x 20 inches, 2021), the composition centres on white narcissus arranged in a jug and set against the diffuse light of a window. A length of string and a basket occupy the table alongside the flowers, the kind of incidental domestic detail that anchors a still life in lived time rather than formal arrangement.

The title's emphasis on window light suggests that the quality of illumination is as much the subject as the flowers themselves, the cool, even light that comes through glass lending the whites of the narcissus their particular luminosity. Oil on canvas allows for the layered handling that such a subject rewards, building up the petals' soft opacity against whatever lies behind them.

13x20 in

Peonies in a Grey Jug

2021

A still life in oil on canvas, painted alla prima in a single sitting in 2021. The subject is a grey jug holding pink peonies, set on a bare table against a grey wall, the whole composition stripped of ornament so that the flowers carry the full weight of the picture.

The alla prima method, in which wet paint is worked into wet without waiting for layers to dry, suits peonies particularly well. Their full, loosely packed heads resist tight rendering and reward a more direct approach, where loaded brushwork can follow the natural movement of the petals. Working in one session also means the light stays consistent throughout, which in a composition this spare matters considerably.

At 13 by 20 inches, the canvas is intimate in scale, a format that keeps the viewer close to the subject rather than at a viewing distance.

13x20 in

Window onto the Rooftops

2022

An oil on canvas of modest, intimate scale (16 x 24 inches), painted in 2022, the composition organized around a mullioned window that frames a spread of tiled rooftops beyond. The window itself becomes the picture's primary subject as much as the view it contains, the division of the panes imposing a quiet geometry on the looser, more atmospheric world outside. Morning light falls across the sill, grounding the scene in a specific, fleeting moment of the day.

The format, taller than it is wide, suits the subject well, allowing the eye to move from the architectural detail of the window in the foreground down and outward across the roofscape. It is a domestic, contemplative kind of painting, in a tradition that runs from Dutch interior views through to the quieter corners of twentieth-century realism, where the threshold between interior and exterior carries as much weight as either space alone.

16x24 in

Bottles and Goldenrod

2023

A still life in oil on canvas, painted in 2023 and measuring 19 by 24 inches. The subject is a grouping of old pharmacy bottles arranged on a dark shelf, accompanied by a sprig of goldenrod, the whole composition lit from the left.

The pairing of apothecary glass with a wildflower places the work in a long tradition of intimate tabletop still life, where the interest lies less in grandeur than in the quiet attention paid to ordinary objects. Goldenrod, with its late-summer associations and warm yellow plume, reads as a counterpoint to the cool, utilitarian forms of the bottles, and the directional lighting from the left would naturally cast the kind of raking shadows that give such arrangements their sense of depth and solidity.

19x24 in

WATERFRONTS

A grouping of works oriented around water and the built or natural edges where land meets sea, canal, or harbour. The pieces gathered here range from the Ligurian coastline, with views of Manarola and Riomaggiore, to the canals and grand waterways of Venice, taking in quieter moments such as a gondola on still green water or a lone sail against an open sea. The Parisian quayside appears as well, in an evening view of the Pont Alexandre III.

Taken together, the works trace a recurring interest in light at transitional hours, particularly dusk and morning, and in the particular atmosphere that water lends to a scene, whether the purple cast of an evening surf, the warm glow settling over the Grand Canal, or the fresh clarity of a Burano morning. The collection moves between the intimate and the panoramic, from a harbour framed by coloured houses to an expanse of open sea with a single sail on the horizon.

Riomaggiore Harbour

2016

A 2016 oil on canvas depicting the harbour at Riomaggiore, the southernmost of the five Cinque Terre villages on the Ligurian coast. The composition centres on the narrow inlet where the village's characteristic painted houses press close to the water, small fishing boats gathered at their feet. The red house that anchors the foreground is a motif closely associated with Riomaggiore's harbour, its warm facade catching the evening light that also rakes across the cliff face rising behind.

At 24 by 18 inches, the format suits the compressed verticality of the scene: the cliffs, the stacked architecture, and the sliver of sheltered water all demand a canvas that reaches upward rather than spreads wide. Oil on canvas allows for the kind of tonal richness that evening harbour light calls for, the distinction between the warm ochres and reds of the buildings and the cooler, shadowed stone of the cliff a natural subject for the medium's depth of colour.

24x18 in

Gondola on the Green Canal

2017

A 2017 oil on canvas, modest in scale at 20 by 30 inches, depicting a single gondola on a narrow Venetian canal. The title's emphasis on colour is telling: where canal water in painting tends toward grey-green or murky brown, here it is rendered almost emerald, giving the composition an intensity that lifts it well beyond topographical record. Ochre palazzi press in on either side, their warm facades throwing the cool luminosity of the water into sharper relief.

The gondola itself, solitary and unattended by any figure the title implies, anchors the composition without crowding it. Venice has attracted painters for centuries precisely because its geography collapses the distinction between solid and reflected, between architecture and water, and a canvas of this size invites an intimate rather than panoramic reading of that relationship. The narrow canal format concentrates attention on surface and light rather than on the broader spectacle of the lagoon.

The 1.5-centimetre depth suggests a standard stretched canvas, likely intended to hang without a frame or with a minimal one, keeping the eye on the painted surface alone.

20x30 in

Grand Canal at Dusk, Venice

2018

An oil on canvas depicting the Grand Canal at the transitional hour between afternoon and evening, when Venice's waterway takes on its most theatrical quality. The title places the scene at dusk, that brief window when the sky shifts through pink and violet and the palaces along the canal begin to show their interior lights before full darkness arrives. The existing note records the signature at lower left.

Painted in 2018, the canvas measures 30 by 19 inches, a vertical format well suited to capturing both the breadth of the canal and the height of the sky above it.

30x19 in

Manarola Above the Sea

2019

Manarola, one of the five villages of the Cinque Terre on the Ligurian coast, is among the most painted subjects in Italian landscape tradition, and this 2019 oil on canvas takes on that subject at a scale, 20 by 30 inches, generous enough to let the composition breathe. The village rises in its characteristic vertical stack of ochre, terracotta, and faded yellow facades above the rocky promontory that drops directly into the sea, a configuration that has drawn painters to this stretch of coastline for well over a century.

The technique is notably mixed in its approach. Palette knife work on the rooftops gives those passages a sculptural, impasto quality, the loaded blade dragging and pressing pigment into ridges that catch light differently from the surrounding brushwork. This contrast between the knife-built architecture and the presumably more fluid handling of sky and water creates a tactile hierarchy that pulls the eye toward the built forms first, letting the sea and light settle around them as atmosphere rather than subject.

20x30 in

Evening Surf, Purple Sea

2019

An oil on canvas (27 × 36 inches), painted in 2019, depicting Atlantic surf at the close of day. The title sets the scene precisely: the sea has shifted into the deep purples and blue-greys that come after the sun drops below the horizon, while gold persists only along the breaking crests, catching the last residual light.

The subject belongs to a long tradition of marine painting attentive to transitional light, the brief interval when colour drains from the water but has not yet surrendered entirely to darkness. Working in oil, the painter would have had full command of the tonal range this moment demands, from the dense, saturated darks of the open water to the warm, luminous flicker at each wave's edge. Whether the handling is loose and gestural or more carefully built up in layers is not recorded here, but the palette implied by the title, purple sea against residual gold, suggests a composition organised around contrast rather than gradation.

27x36 in

Lone Sail, Green Sea

2020

A small oil on canvas, 24 by 17 inches, painted in 2020. A single sailboat heels into the wind across a flat, green sea beneath a heavy, overcast sky. The composition is spare: the boat occupies a narrow wedge of the picture plane, the horizon sits low, and the sky presses down with considerable weight. The palette is cool and restrained, built around the particular grey-green of open water under cloud cover, with little warmth to relieve it. That austerity is the point. The lone vessel reads less as a subject than as a measure of scale and solitude, the kind of image that is as much about the surrounding emptiness as about the thing depicted.

24x17 in

Water Taxi to the Salute

2021

An oil on canvas of 24 by 14 inches, painted in 2021, depicting a water taxi crossing the Grand Canal toward the domed basilica of Santa Maria della Salute. The vertical format suits the subject well: the long, narrow proportions compress the horizontal spread of the canal and draw the eye upward toward the church's silhouette, while the wake cut by the taxi traces a diagonal that gives the composition its forward momentum.

The Salute, completed in 1687 to a design by Baldassare Longhena, has anchored the entrance to the Grand Canal for more than three centuries, and its octagonal drum and paired volutes have made it one of the most painted landmarks in Venice. Placing a working water taxi in the foreground rather than a gondola or a tourist vaporetto gives the scene a contemporary, lived-in quality, the city as it actually moves rather than as it is posed for visitors.

24x14 in

Burano Canal, Morning

2022

An oil on canvas depicting a morning scene along one of Burano's narrow interior canals, painted in 2022. The island, lying in the northern reaches of the Venetian lagoon, has long drawn painters to its compressed geometry: facades pressed close to the water, each house painted a distinct, saturated colour by local tradition, their reflections broken by the hulls of moored boats. The format, 20 by 30 inches, suits the subject well, giving the composition enough horizontal room to follow the canal's recession while keeping the scale intimate.

Without the painting in hand, the precise handling of light and paint surface cannot be described here, but the title's emphasis on morning suggests an interest in the particular quality of early light on the lagoon, cooler and more directional than the diffuse midday glare that flattens Burano's famous colours into postcard brightness. Morning light on those facades tends to cast long lateral shadows and pick out the texture of stucco and weathered paint, effects that reward the oil medium's capacity for both impasto weight and glazed transparency.

20x30 in

Pont Alexandre III, Evening

2023

An oil on canvas depicting the Pont Alexandre III at dusk, painted in 2023. At 30 by 21 inches, the format is upright and intimate, well suited to the vertical drama of the bridge's ornate lampposts catching the last of the light against a deepening purple sky.

The Pont Alexandre III is among the most photographed crossings in Paris, completed in 1900 for the Exposition Universelle and named in honour of the Franco-Russian alliance. Its gilded sculptures, Art Nouveau candelabras, and low, single-span arch over the Seine have made it a recurring subject for painters drawn to the city's capacity for theatrical light. The evening hour is a natural choice for this subject: the moment when the electric lamps begin to assert themselves against the fading sky, and the bridge's ornamental excess reads less as civic grandeur than as something more atmospheric and personal.

The curator's own note captures the governing idea concisely: the lamps coming on one by one. That sequential illumination, the bridge waking up lamp by lamp rather than all at once, gives the composition a sense of time passing within a single image. The purple sky sets a cool, receding ground against which the warm points of light would read with quiet insistence. Whether the treatment is broadly impressionistic or more tightly rendered cannot be determined without seeing the work directly, but the subject and palette together suggest a painting interested in transition, in the precise threshold between day and night.

30x21 in

INDEX

City Streets — 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

MacLeod, Erin — 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24

25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38

39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45

Open Country — 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

Sketchbook Cities — 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27

28, 29

Still Life & Windows — 30, 31, 32, 33

Waterfronts — 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42

43, 44, 45

Erin MacLeod

A Retrospective 2016-2025