William Mackinnon’s much-celebrated art sits somewhere between an imagined Australiana, and the places where that ideal inevitably frays, encroached upon by what can’t be idealised – grief, separation, and horizons of loss and longing.
Born in Melbourne and now based between Ibiza and Lorne, Will’s work is dominated by what he calls ‘psychological landscapes’: uncanny, quasi-surrealist representations of highways, coastlines, and the desert interior, where the familiar is edged with the dreamlike and the menacing. He has shown widely, with over twenty solo shows, and group exhibitions at the NGV, the AGNSW, and the Royal College in London, and his work is held in various public and private collections, including the NGV, NGA, Parliament House, and Colección SOLO, Madrid.
Will’s paintings hold you in the disorientation of being in-between two worlds. For him, these worlds are Spain and Australia, across memory and embodied immediacy, between what is longed for and what is (or can be) returned to. This ‘slippage’, as he calls it, fills his landscapes with deceptive surfaces that seem to shift with the viewer – much like the experience surfing or ocean swimming, as you feel the sand move under your feet. His paintings are also remarkable for their physicality; not only in their scale, but in the dense, tactile movement of the paint that has been added, scraped back, and rebuilt into unexpected forms. The works evolve through these acts of control and destruction, as small ‘alchemical’ (Will’s words) reactions that keep the practice open, searching and alive.
We spoke to Will at his beautiful Lorne property, The Artist’s Beach House (which is now available to rent!), about the rituals behind this creative practice, the role that coffee plays in his days, and what makes his Cathedral Rock home so special. Whether in Ibiza or Melbourne, coffee is an always-reliable companion to artmaking, as both stimulant and structure. The Artist’s Beach House itself is its own self-contained world, grounded in the pleasure of stepping back and disconnecting. It offers a safe, suspended moment of calm – the kind of place where an artist – even in the tumult of creation – can return to the simple daily habits that make space for the work to arrive.
