From the Studio of RFM McInnis – The Village Series

Please join MFA in wishing the exceptional Robert McInnis a very happy 80th birthday and please enjoy this select collection of works recently painted from the artist’s studio in Laval, QC.

These, and other select works, are available to view both online and in-person at our Tuxedo location from March 1, 2022, to March 31, 2022.

Statement from the Artist:

“These new paintings have been painted from my apartment windows on the top floor of a six-story building on the west end of the Island of Laval, Quebec.

The views of the ‘village’ remind me of those Japanese woodblock prints which impacted me at art school many years ago. The views depicted in this series are of trees and bungalows on a street in Fabreville and of subdivisions not far away. It is the shapes and spaces created by the formalist elements of light and dark, large and small, geometric and organic, and of course, from saturated color to black and white, as the seasons change.

Like Claud Monet with his London bridge, cathedral fronts, and haystack paintings; like Henri Matisse with his views of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, all are painted from one window. These are series paintings, created throughout the year, from Spring to Winter.

Variations are made from adjusted viewpoints by drawing with pencil first, to select only the simplest and important aspects of the scene, playing down the subject matter and abstracting from it. Then it is painted the same way, from life, in an expressive movement of brush strokes seeking what I feel with paint, and less of what I see. I’m quite excited by these latest developments in my work.”

RFM
Laval, QC
2022