Guiding themes in Lindsay’s work include her love of gesture and portrait drawing, her appreciation for landscapes and nature, and her deep curiosity with color.
Lindsay MacCuaig attended The Rhode Island School of Design and Maryland Institute College of Art, where she received a BFA in Painting, and a Masters in Teaching Art. After college and graduate school, she spent eighteen years teaching for Baltimore City Public Schools.- Visual Arts for fifteen years, and then Construction, Design and Management for three. She left teaching in 2017, and for the next three years learned how to build cabinets for Monkton Design Build. She currently alternates between building and painting, always entrenched in a project.
Guiding themes in Lindsay’s work include her love of gesture and portrait drawing, her appreciation for landscapes and nature, and her deep curiosity with color. Starting in her freshman year at RISD, she has always been amazed at how one can interpret a person through minute changes in line, shape and mark, how a person’s essence can be captured with a pen on a piece of paper. Her collection of pen and ink portraits illustrates her love of observational drawing, as well as her love of detail. As a painter, she has always been drawn to landscapes. Whether “abstract” or “representational,” all of her landscapes are based on observation. Each painting represents a moment in time where she has been moved enough by a certain combination of colors that she wants to stop and spend time capturing it in order to share the experience with others.
Lindsay was granted the opportunity to study in Canada in 2007 through a Fund for Teachers Grant. Here she became fascinated with tourists. She loved the state in which she had to get in order to capture their fleeting movement across a given space. She was competing with time, as tourists only stop and look for so long. Because of this, she did not have time to interpret what she saw- she didn’t give her ego time to analyze her work- she simply spent time looking and seeing, and represented these observations with color. Some of these figurative landscapes are her favorite paintings yet- to her they feel honest, courageous, funny and fun.
Her current body of work synthesizes her love for gesture drawing, portraiture, landscapes, and most of all, her continued sense of awe at the magic of color. In this body of work, she is creating interactions- interactions between the characters she choses to place in a given space, and interactions between the characters and the space in which they are placed. She is inviting viewers to participate in these interactions- with the individual characters, with the group, and with the surrounding space and colors. Her hope is that similar to how she enjoys paintings that invite her in and allow her the space to roam, that her work does the same for you.