Will McLeod is a multidisciplinary artist living in Hudson NY. McLeod became an artist by way of Fashion; he specialized in women’s wear design and domestic product development for a decade. In 2016 Will changed life paths and decided to make art for art’s sake instead of continuing in design.
Will currently works mainly, in 2 mediums: 1: Drawing and painting small-scale on paper, and 2: Large-scale, machine sewn textiles based upon those works on paper.
McLeod’s subjects are reactive scrawls of color and near symbols that tangle and unravel into tight psychedelic dream-scapes. The compositions evade meaning, but because Will’s mark making suggests figurative and energy forms, the confident alien heaps become anthropomorphic.
The shapes point, bounce, cleave, and separate in jagged scattershot ways. Will likes to force a troupe of seemingly unrelated characters into a new cohesion. Illustrating dissonance so floridly reminds the viewer how some parts of the imagination are like a cave of the unknown while also being wholly intentional.
The paintings and drawings of these compositions are the bread and butter of Will’s practice. They are worked quickly and emotionally with quick drying acrylics and watercolors, graphic markers, and soft shadowy colored pencils. Will works on paper because he prefers the feeling of boring down on the page.
The textiles Will creates are exacting replicas of these 2-D works. They are dazzling opuses of technical skill that bridge Will’s love for Craft and Art. McLeod employ’s a fantastic studio practice to recreate the original references.
Using patternmaking and math, Will creates a dizzying map of paint by numbers style seam lines to re-create the reference painting’s details. He sews together color and texture matched pattern pieces of fabric, puzzling the network of seamed cloth panels into one large cloth panel. The sewn works are then pulled taut and cleanly around stretcher bars, the final product glamouring the viewer. The textile works look like soft, stained-glass assemblages, or a painter’s canvas.
These 2 mediums are love stories to each other and to art making. Both mediums directly beget and behoove the next. The final projects enrich the compositions and processes.
Will’s works are stories of the tools in his hand when he’s creating, alongside a door into his imagination and personal life. One can see the paint, ink, nap, thread, and structural intent within the works and one can find glimpses of natural spiritual worlds- curvy and touching like bodies or fleeting and vibrational like shadows or whirlpools.
Will’s mission as an artist is to create pieces that glorify and illuminate process so that the viewer can see the truths of the methods, materials, and humanistic nature of artmaking while also being vague enough that the viewer can find their own truth.
