View the Images

Scott MacLeod’s landscapes of human experience are full of traces of tragedy, echoes of historical events. Yet these scenes are not mere recreations of past and present suffering. The codes and signals of past and present cultural experience are the food, the language of experience MacLeod uses to shine a light on issues of survival common to cultures from all parts of the world. MacLeod’s response is a subjective one, developed out of his own perception of the world. These are freely interpretive expressions that underline the suffering and hardship that always accompanies humanity’s ongoing struggle to co-exist in a world that emphasises competition, exploitation rather than mutual sharing and care for resources and peoples. Scott MacLeod develops his themes as part of an ongoing scenario, juxtaposing imagery, colour and forms. In 1995 MacLeod’s The Starving Can’t Eat Stone show addressed the plight of Irish immigrants to North America who, having escaped the potato famines, found themselves besieged by cholera, poverty and human tragedy. Their struggles on the other side of the Atlantic were as painful and tragic as those in their departed homelands. Only 50,000 of the 100,000 Irish pioneers who emigrated to Canada during the Diaspora survived. As Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland stated in an address made after visiting Grosse-Île, Quebec in 1995:

The Red Hand of Ulster (1995) takes a look at an ancient Irish legend that existed long before the journey of some 150 years ago that brought so many Irish to the New World. This becomes a point of departure for subsequent works. In ancient times, it is said, the Vikings raced across the seas in boats to claim Ireland for their own people. Erik, whose boat was in second place as they neared the land, cut off his hand and threw it ahead onto the shore thus claiming Ireland. There is an intense feeling of inevitability and of the as yet unquantifiable suffering and hardship - of Ireland’s own “tenants of time” (who withstood 800 years of colonial repression) in the dark profile of a man we see in MacLeod’s painting who stands on the shore, looking out at the approaching boats.

Culture and technology play a major role in these paintings that bear witness to historic and cultural adaptation. For the native Amerindians, whose culture was deeply affected by European intervention on their lands, the buffalo was a staple source of food, clothing, fuel, and parts of its body were equally used in rituals, so important to their tribal culture. In the tipi-shaped canvas What the Buffalo Provides (1999), MacLeod pays tribute to the sophisticated ecological integration that was, and still is, part of Native culture in North America. Descriptive texts can be seen around a central painted image of a buffalo. They describe the specific traditional use of so many facets of the buffalo in traditional Native culture: the brain (hide tanning), the horn (cups, spoons, powder horns), the tail (ceremonial ornaments), bone (food, knives , ornament)., hide (clothing), and buffalo chips or manure (fuel). A second tipi-shaped canvas – Where the Buffalo Ended and the Man Began, 1999 – cites Lakota medicine man John (Fire) Lame Deer:

The tipi-shape MacLeod has adopted for these canvases alludes to this economical, ecologically integrated form of architecture that was a common kind of shelter habitation used by Native peoples in pre-contact North America. In The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, George Kubler states that “conquest was followed at once by massive European substitution of useful and symbolic behaviour for native traditions. Only the useful items new and necessary to Europeans survived the wholesale destruction of the Native American civilisations (potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate. etc.).”3 Ironically it was a Native food staple – the potato – introduced into Europe around 1570 by the Spaniards who had encountered it in their explorations of South America that served as a principle food source for the poor in Ireland. When the potato famines occurred in Ireland over a century and a half ago, there was large scale immigration to Canada. Many who arrived at Grosse-Île, Canada’s Ellis Island on the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City, died of typhoid and cholera. Herein lies the parallel that MacLeod draws between Native and Irish culture. In his painting titled Digging for Our History (1999), a mixed media on wood painting that depicts a woman surrounded by children digging potatoes, with a large scale painted image of the potato plant and smaller scenes of rows of crosses of the dead and rows of potato drills or lazy beds. Alongside this MacLeod has included the poem Digging by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. It begins with the words:

MacLeod integrates all these fragments together in Digging for Our History as one continuous painted piece. They are simultaneously image fragments, recreations, cues to an era that has passed whose visual signals or cues document a way of living so ingenuous and crucial to the cultural survival of the Irish people. A context is established in the process that has a lot to do with material culture, with the way we perceive the meaning of things according to our personal experience of them, as expressed in Seamus Heaney’s endearing poem. Somehow, the miracle of growth, this food source - the potato - represents is so simple and evocative it communicates a universal message about love and caring, so deeply associated with our historical roots in the soil and the land. The issue of physical survival almost seems secondary to that of cultural survival. The fact that we share our experience in different ways today is not forgotten.

Scott MacLeod’s paintings present scenes as socio-cultural phenomena. The folkways of culture, habitat, shelter, and even more basic — food — become a way of relating all human cultures’ dramatic adventure to the planet earth, the ecosystem of which we are all a part. Scott MacLeod applies his art to address specific politically determined events in the paintings Flight From Famine (1995) and Starved Blind (1995). The forlorn, starved and sick children in these works are not without hope. It is their situation that is hopeless, and forces beyond their control that have led to their tragic fate. There is a kind of mystic sense that suggests an intense perception of things that goes beyond their outward meaning or supposed appearance. It is as if the very traditional aspect of painting itself is not equal to the subjects MacLeod is trying to depict. The packing crate with its cocktail glass and umbrella symbols embossed onto it are merely a backdrop, a prop onto which the image of a helpless child has been painted. An empty spoon rests on the sheets beside this living corpse of a once healthy child. The painted image becomes just a Third World detail in this mixed media New World Order collage. The broader context symbolized by the packing crate and plywood is more foreboding for this child’s fate is not poverty per se which implies a social stigma. The causes and effects are invisible, less human than in past tragedies.

We now live in a “global economy” where events taking place in the West affect the Third World. Why are there so many wars, skirmishes, between smaller nations of the world? Is this not in some part related to trade, exploitation of resources and labour, the destabilization of local indigenous cultures, or what is left of them by multinationals? Corruption and greed are the tip of this iceberg. Famine, poverty, war, Third World inflation and debt are the unseen part. Technology is offered as humanity’s panacea for the world’s problems. How is it possible there is more hunger, starvation, war than ever before? The most basic necessities such as food and shelter (a subject that surfaces continuously in Scott MacLeod’s paintings) remain humanity’s most urgent need, all over the world and this implies understanding nature’s essential place in human culture. So it is fitting that MacLeod has painted a tribute to Maize or Corn (Ma-Hiz, Maize, Indian Corn, 1999), another world food source introduced to the West from the Americas after colonization. MacLeod presents a bridge to these two worlds, the poor colonial’s and the indigenous native’s in The Decimation of Our Relatives (1999) and does so with a painter’s perception, recreating scenes of the past of both Native and colonial peoples simultaneously in the same canvas. The lessons of history are all here, in the image of one of the notorious “coffin ships” that carried the poor emigrants as ballast on their journey to the promised land, in the crosses erected to commemorate over 10,000 Irish immigrants who died at Grosse-Île, the Quarantine Station situated east of the Île d’Orleans in the St. Lawrence River with its “lazarets” and bell tents erected to handle the sick and dying, in the image of the buffalo hunt, and the piles of buffalo skulls that resulted from a shift in technology due to the introduction of the white man’s weapons that so transformed the fragile balance of native culture (and nearly extinguished the buffalo population in the process), and the Celtic cross whose central circle and radiating struts bears a strange resemblance to the native medicine wheel.

MacLeod’s latest paintings build and develop new interpretations of past events and present tragedies in a way that would not have been possible except in our present time. He is a seeker who breaks the barriers of silence. These paintings are like sequential reflections on the dilemma of a historical cultural viewpoint that is hopefully now changing. These works stimulate and awaken a new response to the tragedies that many cultures of the world have experienced and are presently experiencing. They establish links between various cultural sources and events such as the Irish emigrants and the Native Amerindians. They are not necessarily post-historical, more proto-historical, for all this suffering, victimization, experience is rendered equal, comparable, and we empathise precisely because the experience is universal, nature the provider being the common bond between all cultures, the raw material upon which all civilisations past and present have been built.

John K. Grande
Bishop’s University Art Gallery, Lennoxville, Quebec