Malcolm’s highly textural style creates sculptural effects. His unfettered use of colour deepens those effects and stimulates the viewer’s imagination. In this series he doesn’t reproduce the submerged portion of the iceberg that we all know is there. He textures and sculpts in bold colours the energy force fields at work deep below the line of visual perception. He provides us with his personal insights toward the very meaning of life and challenges us to expand our understanding of ourselves as a result. That is the essence of visual art.

Shifting Gears

Seven years ago Hugh Malcolm was living out his career fantasies as Art Director of the Ottawa Senators Hockey Team. In his previous job he had been Publications Manager and illustrator for the Canadian Nursing Association where he enjoyed the socially relevant content and his dedicated colleagues, but chafed under the bureaucratic constraints and delays. He thrived on the challenge and excitement of the supercharged Senators environment. “I went from low gear to overdrive the moment I joined the Sens. We would conceive, approve and execute a major marketing project in a week!”

When the Going Gets Tough…

Three years later Malcolm embarked on an intense journey of self discovery when he could no longer ignore or conceal the worrisome signals his body was semaphoring. It took a five-month medical process of elimination before he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease. He was able to work a year longer, and values highly his ongoing affiliation with the “amazing people I worked with.”

The Tough Get Painting

The disease is an expensive gift, but Hugh considers himself a stronger person because of it. He has developed new strengths. After two decades of doing commercial graphic art, he now is “exploring art for myself.” He has found the courage to submit himself to public judgment by exhibiting and selling his pieces at Bittersweet Gallery in Burnstown. It’s a tough thing to do, and vastly different than working as part of a creative team. Before, his job was to use art to sell and to influence behaviour. He knows how to create paintings that will sell and has to constantly fight the temptation to “go commercial.”

Now his goal is to see as much as he can see, and to use art as a language to encourage others to see for themselves. He is determined to bear witness to what he is learning on his uncharted journey with an intractable foe. Through adversity he has found the strength and the wisdom to live in the moment, to enjoy what he has instead of worrying about the unpredictable future. That is a true gift.

Much of his past experience is helping him on this new journey. As a hard-headed, curious, belligerent teenager whose parents were dissolving a 25-year marriage, he was sent to St. John’s Cathedral Boarding School in Winnipeg as a “potential Ritalin kid.” By the age of sixteen he was an intrepid outdoorsman who twice made the 18-day paddling trip from Thunder Bay to Winnipeg in a 22-foot freighter canoe. It weighed 400 pounds when it was wet, and he was one of the four “Voyageurs” who carried it across a nine-mile portage in about two and a half hours. “We ran,” he explained. Physical activity was the perfect escape valve for his excess of energy and his lack of patience when he judged inadequate the answers to his endless questions.

That same impatience later led him to abandon studies first at the University of Winnipeg and again while pursuing a degree in fine arts at the University of Manitoba. He quit school and married Kathy Sheahan, who just happened to hail from Renfrew. She embarked on a steadily progressing career in the banking industry. He worked as an orderly, at a lodge and as a sign painter. He tried office work and filled his loan application forms with doodles. He tried working for a clothing manufacturer and today refers to ties as leashes.

He always drew. His Headmaster from the boarding school remembered him years later as “the kid who drew caricatures of the teachers.” When Kathy was transferred to Toronto, Hugh found work for advertising companies and printing companies, and took courses in studio management, typography and design. From the first time he had traveled to Renfrew he wanted to move to the area, and Kathy requested a transfer. Hugh got a job in Burnstown working for Tim Gordon of General Store Publishing and eventually started his own graphic design business. When he lost some of his biggest clients during the business slow-down in the 80s, he took his artistic talents to the Canadian Nurses Association.

The couple moved to their current 100-year-old house in Renfrew, only 25 minutes away from some of Hugh’s favourite fishing spots. “There are only two times I can forget that I have Parkinson’s,” he tells me; “one is when I’m fishing, and the other is when I’m painting, and it’s even more intense. It’s the way I put things in order in my life.” He achieves Nirvana when “my paintings just flow, just happen.”

To my surprise, he describes himself as a closet misanthrope whose saving grace is a sense of humour. He credits his wife, Kathy, whom he adores, respects, and admires, with being “a wonderful people person,” and his best friend. I’d love to meet her.

Beyond the Surface

Hugh Malcolm’s art is born in the true imaginative forces of his courageous exploration of his own inner feelings. His paintings consequently possess the evocative magic that enables viewers to not just share Malcolm’s experience, but to explore their own inner feelings. His current exhibit at Bittersweet Gallery in Burnstown is a marvellous opportunity to do so. Clip his Artist Trading Card at the top of the page for easy reference when you want to contemplate what lies beyond the surface of your consciousness.