Today we’d like to introduce you to Todd McKie.
Todd, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I grew up, to the extent I ever did, in Bucks County, PA. Both my parents were artists. As a kid, I loved to design and draw cars and, for some reason, football uniforms. Go figure!
In high school I had an art teacher who encouraged what he saw as my raw talent and urged me to apply to an art school. I did, and majored in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. I spent a year in Rome on RISD’s European Honor Program, I returned home, married my art school sweetheart, and set out to be a “real” artist.
We were poor as church mice for several years. Then I was awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The grant was, by today’s standards, peanuts, but on the strength of it, I quit my day job moving furniture around and never looked back. A Boston gallery started showing and selling my work and that led to representation by a well-known New York gallery. My life as an artist has allowed me to travel extensively and meet a lot of fascinating people along the way.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
The work looks, I hope, spontaneous. However, it’s not easy being simple; that’s where the drawing comes in. The drawings are made with pen or pencil on cheap paper and function as visual notes to myself, notes that can be altered as I move from idea to execution. Because I also make sculpture and prints, the ideas and images used in those other mediums find their way, inevitably, into the paintings. Travel influences my work, too; places I’ve been, people I’ve met, meals that I’ve eaten, all may appear in the paintings.
Despite the preparatory drawings, when I begin a painting I try to have a direct response to what’s happening on the canvas. I try to be open to a happy accident when it comes along. It’s often difficult to know as I work just where a particular image comes from, what it’s about. Months or years later, though, I’ll realize, Oh, yeah, that was about that trip to France when it rained for three weeks, or a truly amazing fresco in a dimly-lit Italian church, or that time I fell and hurt my knee. I’m not sure what it all means. I try hard to make the most beautiful, mysterious, most colorful, funniest, and truest paintings I can. Once in a while, I succeed.
Any advice for aspiring or new artists?
Work hard, look at other people’s art, dress comfortably. Nowadays, most of the best art schools have at least some classes and /or workshops to learn about marketing one’s work. That was nonexistent when I attended RISD. When asked by young artists about how to get gallery representation, I often urge them to make interesting friends; one of them will open a gallery eventually. Also, who doesn’t want interesting friends!
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
Locally I show my paintings, prints, sculpture and drawings at Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury Street, Boston. I will be having an exhibition there in the spring of 2019. My work is available to be seen there at any time, however.
My work can also be seen at Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown, MA and at Carver Hill Gallery, Camden ME. A large-scale mural of mine can be seen at the South Station Transportation Building in Boston. I’m represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; University of Texas, Austin; Microsoft Corporation, Seattle; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; and numerous other public and private collections.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.toddmckie.com
- Email: toddmckie@comcast.net
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/todd.mckie.75
- Other: www.gallerynaga.com/
Image Credit:
Bill Kipp, Xavier de Luca.
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