ESSAY I Euan Macleod’s In Darkness Let Me Dwell

The figure that has evolved in Euan Macleod’s paintings across the decades is a wanderer, moving into the allegorical space of his own becoming. This pictorial world has firm origins in the artist’s experiences and never has it been more acutely personal than in the paintings of In Darkness Let Me Dwell, 2026.

Fool on a Hill, 2023, acrylic paint, polyester, 210 x 480 cm.

Two years ago, Macleod returned to his hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand, to be with his mother during the final phase of her life. At Sumner Beach, they revisited the familiar rock formation known as Tuawera or Cave Rock, a hulking, volcanically formed volume opening onto an interior space that changes with the tides. To a painter who builds then excavates his pictures until figure and ground haunt each other, it seems destined to have become a motif, reflecting intense emotions that were, for him, inflected with beauty.

“I used to take my mother in the wheelchair and do drawings,” he explains in his studio in suburban Sydney, in advance of the exhibition at King Street Gallery on William. In the most directly autobiographical picture, a man wheels a woman dressed in violet along the seawall, while in the cavity of the rock a human body trails off into vapour. Few painters would naturally arrive at such raw expression; it is possible for Macleod due to the depth of feeling that underscores the work and because the painterly dissolution of earth and flesh into atmosphere has been intrinsic to his work for years. On an adjacent wall of the studio, a group of small, gouache on paper paintings, alive with the interplay of form and void, shows the genesis of the exhibition. “They were done very quickly,” Macleod says, “and without any thought of resolution.”

Tunnel Beach, 2026, oil paint, polyester, 100 x 124 cm. Photographed by Jenni Carter.

As open as he is to conversing about the circumstances behind his new work, he prefers that the pictures be understood emotionally rather than factually. “People put their own meaning onto a painting, and I love it when somebody says to me, ‘that one reminded me of a time when. . .’ But,” he adds, standing near a mysterious composition of an umbrella-bearing figure in driving rain, “the only way you can get that is through the integrity and honesty you put in yourself.”

As an art student at Christchurch’s Ilam School of Fine Arts in the late 1970s, Macleod entered a culture in which abstraction reigned and local imagery was scorned as regional. From the distance of almost fifty years, he can express gratitude for the rigour that education gave him, while recognising that he was never going to become the kind of painter that teachers like Ted Bracey (1936–2009) were intent on fostering. “Art needs something to nurture it,” he concludes. “The formal side of things is very important and I was really glad to go through that because there was an emphasis on trying to paint a good painting. But that, to me, is never an end in itself.”

Umbrella and 2 Dogs, Corinth, 2026, oil paint, polyester cotton, 100 x 124 cm. Photographed by Michael Bradfield.