“As a senior, nationally known, Vancouver-based artist, Landon Mackenzie has long been admired for her expansive and intense large-scale works with paint on canvas. Less widely known are her works on paper, which she produced voluminously as a tandem practice to her big paintings, often while traveling. Somewhere between jottings and finished works intended for public exhibition, these small paintings speak to the deepest level of human creativity. They function at times as glimpses into this intelligent artist’s inner self or psyche.”
– Liz Wylie

When Mackenzie first arrived in Halifax in 1972, her Foundation class was charged with making a large wall drawing from instructions sent by conceptual artist Sol Lewitt at the invitation of her teacher, the concrete poet Emmett Williams. Mackenzie’s task involved many lines in red pencil at a specific angle in her sectioned square on the wall.

Mackenzie’s NSCAD experiences led to her being recognized early on for works in printmaking with her Single Plate Etchings, which she continued in graduate school in Montreal. In these she altered metal plates often or daily before printing in black or dark ink. Her methods followed her into the way she began making her large, time-based paintings.

By the nineties, watercolour on paper became a parallel practice including when Mackenzie was the invited workshop leader to Emma Lake Artist Residency in 1995. Soon after, on a trip to Japan for a show, she found small handmade paper booklets in an art shop and at night she added miniature narrative images into their pages. This started a fascination for non-European papers. During a winter sabbatical in Berlin in 2007, she returned to her love of black and white, and layered ink and gesso as her main focus. From this, she received the Paris Studio as a grant from the Canada Council in 2009. She was back in Berlin for several months as a Fellow of ZK/U to continue working on paper in 2013. These longer European stints, and other trips to Asia as visiting artist-professor at CAFA-Beijing, or as an artist to Tao Hua Tan in rural Anhui Province, furthered her exploration with colour and asian papers. Other opportunities continued in Noja (Spain); Oaxaca (Mexico), or the Similkameen Valley (Canada).

Recent series on paper include, THT, 2018 and 2019; Sayulita Suite, 2023; Oaxaca Folio, 2024; and Hummingbird (Paper), 2024

Look for more images in this section in the future.