About
Will McLeod, born 1985, in North Carolina, USA, lives and works in Hudson, New York. He is a multidisciplinary artist with a previous career in fashion design and development that informs his current art making.
McLeod paint and draws uninhibited, and graphic works that become the aesthetic blueprints for his creative practice.
Will reveres the freedom in those works, so he explores them. He objectifies the mark-making of the 2-D works, through math and grids, and patterns the composition at a larger scale, like a paint by numbers couturier.
Will reconfigures the instinctual nature of these referenced paintings and drawings into meticulously planned, seamed cloth panels that look like soft stained-glass assemblages. He pulls the sewing taut and cleanly around stretcher bars; the final product glamours the viewer. The work resembles a painter’s canvas.
McLeod strives for his art to exude a quality of equanimity between method and magic, an in between-ness where the works exist just for themselves. He creates 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.