BRAD MACIVER

After graduating from the Fine Arts programme at York university in the early 1970s with a specialty in studio art, primarily painting and drawing, I spent several years working at various part time jobs in Toronto while focusing on painting and printmaking. The pressing realities of paying rent and feeding myself led to opportunities in the advertising and graphic design fields which I enjoyed but which gradually overtook my efforts as a fledgling artist.

Serendipity introduced me to a magazine editor who was looking for a graphic designer and what started as just another part time gig turned out to be a long and fulfilling career as an art director during what many of my editorial colleagues now remember as a “golden age” of Canadian magazines. I left that world behind after about thirty years to spend the next ten as the Creative Director at the LCBO, the Ontario government’s liquor retailer.

Upon retiring I challenged myself to return to what had been my passion as a young art student—painting. Picking up the brushes again re-ignited that passion and it has been something of an obsession ever since.

Having spent so many years designing magazine pages, using images created by others, the freedom and challenge of the empty canvas might have proved daunting. Luckily I have long been an amateur photographer and it soon became clear that I would never want for subject matter. My work is now based on photos which rely heavily on careful composition and attention to detail. There is a stillness in my paintings, whether object-based or landscape, that seems to resonate with viewers and that I’ve come to realize is something of a guiding principle for me. Like all artists, I’m an observer, regularly struck by the beauty of visual “moments,” anxious to see how I can expand upon them in the studio. Inspiration comes from everything around me: cloud-filled skies, frozen ponds, sleeping dogs, shadows on walls, wheat fields, stacks of books on a coffee table. Small things and large, all worthy of attention.

I live with my partner and two rescue dogs in the beautiful rolling countryside of Mulmur Township, a couple of hours north of Toronto.