Canadian painter John Mackintosh uses a personal iconography and heavily stylized aesthetic that remain widely accessible. His works with acrylic have a sweeping grandeur that evokes an aura of myth and universal resonance. Complex figures and settings burst forth with dramatic and clean three-dimensional hues, eliciting an uncanny impression of volume. Mackintosh uses strong colors, sharp dramatic lines and carefully rendered shading to create a sense of connection and narrative progression that leads viewers through the canvas.

Indeed, much of Mackintosh’s self-taught art practice is informed by his interest in systems of belief, faith and nature. Accordingly, his paintings pose natural shapes, objects and beings in highly-symbolic settings, creating a kind of spiritual model from relatively common figures. In elaborately abstracted backdrops and characters melded with their natural surroundings, viewers get a sense of the metaphysical connections linking supposedly separate entities. Disparate objects brought under John Mackintosh’s softly grandiose aesthetic achieve a kind of synergy, testifying to the presence of some invisible power connecting all living things.