Scots Canadian David Mackenzie, IV (1942-2020) was born in Los Angeles, California. His parents divorced when Mackenzie was two years old and he spent his youth living with his mother and her family in Orange County, California. His maternal grandfather, William Rhodes was career navy, and a tinkerer and craftworker, who taught Mackenzie perspective and the use of construction tools.^[1] That relationship laid the foundation for his wide-ranging artistic interests that included painting, sculpture, building, and other creative pursuits.

Mackenzie credits his earliest lessons in painting to his maternal aunt, who showed him how to stretch and prepare a canvas.^[2] While in high school, his family moved to Laguna Beach, California, which is noted for its early twentieth-century colony of landscape and marine plein air painters, as well as a continuing robust art community, which further inspired his love of art. As a young man, Mackenzie poured over art books from the local library, and his mother encouraged his interest, driving him into Los Angeles to visit the galleries along La Cienega Boulevard, which featured openings on Monday evenings.^[3] According to his autobiographical sketch, Mackenzie also taught himself about the history of modern and contemporary artists in California, especially those in the light and space movement, as well as New York artists who he cites as influences, including Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. In addition, he took painting classes from Peter Krohn, a San Francisco transplant to Laguna Beach, who taught him how to grind and make his own oil paints.

After High School, Mackenzie attended community college at Orange Coast College where he received his AA degree in 1963. Upon graduating, Mackenzie, along with sculptor Richard Shaw, painter Gary Stephan, sculptor John Duff, and several other artist friends from the college moved to San Francisco where he attended the Art Institute (SFAI) and for a time shared an apartment with tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy. At SFAI he studied ceramics under well-known artists Ron Nagel and Jim Melchert, graduating in 1968. His undergraduate painting instructor was Bay Area Figurative artist Joan Brown, and later in graduate school he studied painting under Tom Holland. This dual interest in ceramics and painting informs the innovations he brought to his practice even though he identified as a painter rather than ceramicist. He was awarded his MFA from the school in 1970.

Drawing from the ceramic technique of slip casting, Mackenzie began using molds to cast liquid acrylic, a relatively new kind of paint at the time. Staining fiberglass cloth in the manner of Morris Louis, Mackenzie then laid the cloth on a mold and saturated it with clear acrylic. Once dried, he peeled the resulting skins of paint from the mold and hung them from the wall with pushpins. Eventually he applied them to canvas.^[4] This inventive technique of cast painting utilized Rhoplex (a water-based acrylic emulsion), with which he eventually produced large-scale works. His paintings using this method were included in the important 1971 Oakland Museum of Art exhibition “Off the Stretcher.” Mackenzie’s innovation was recognized by Marcia Tucker, one of the 1975 Whitney Biennial curators, who chose one of his Cast Rhoplex paintings for that exhibition. Acknowledged as the most prestigious exhibit to chronicle the state of contemporary American art, his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial confirmed his national status.

In 1968, the year he graduated from the Art Institute, Mackenzie also met his future wife, RISD-trained Martha Mackey, who he married in 1973. In 1976 the couple traveled to Europe to view classical masterworks of art in Rome, Paris, and Amsterdam, specifically paintings by Rembrandt. Mackey remembers especially their visit to the San Marco Convent, Florence, where the cloister paintings of Fra Angelico had a lasting impact on Mackenzie’s understanding and use of space.^[5]

Additionally, Mackenzie’s youthful lessons in construction remained a passionate pursuit throughout his life. He and Mackey bought their first house in San Francisco’s Outer Mission District, and he set about drawing up detailed plans and building its kitchen cabinets and a pantry. According to Mackey, “David was always drawing up plans for things – he loved tongue and groove construction.”^[6] She also relayed that he loved drawing pipe fittings, plumbing, and all the mechanical components of a structure, which is confirmed by numerous drawings in his notebooks.

In 1971, after initially working out of a studio on Clyde Street in San Francisco’s South of Market district, Mackenzie and fellow artists George Ernstson and Gary Apotheker leased the Old Homestead Bakery/warehouse building on Shotwell in the city’s Mission District. They divided the building into numerous rental spaces, including a large studio for each of them. Well-known Art Institute professor of painting, assemblage, and conceptual art Carlos Villa was one of his studio tenants. Later Mackenzie and Apotheker purchased the building; however, the archives also document numerous difficulties that arose from having tenants, which led them to sell the building in 1985.^[7]

An insightful curator as well as artist, in December 1976 Mackenzie organized the exhibition 18 Artists of the Bay Area at Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA). The show, which included his own paintings, travelled to University Art Museum Berkeley, California. Among his other endeavors, he was guest curator in 1977 for an exhibition at his alma mater, San Francisco Art Institute, and served as guest curator in 1979 at Humbolt State University, Arcata, California. In 1983 he organized the exhibition New Abstract Painters from Los Angeles for SFAI.

In 1986, Mackenzie and Mackey moved to New York, where for the next twenty years he continued to expand on the ideas that he had formulated in San Francisco. Although by 1980, Mackenzie was no longer using his cast Rhoplex method, he continued to experiment with acrylic mediums, developing increasingly complex, layered compositions of pigmented abstract shapes. Mackenzie bought 2 flats and a store at 315 Columbia Street, Brooklyn.^[8] As he had in San Francisco, Mackenzie used his considerable construction skills to renovate this property to create a home, an artist studio for himself and additional tenant unit.

It was here in Brooklyn where he developed his mature style of disciplined, meticulously constructed canvases. Mackenzie’s artist statement describes his process of employing a “low-tech screen printing technique using acrylic paint pushed through screening fabric laid over cut paper shapes and then peeled off.”^[9] This process results in paintings on canvas that are built up in layers akin to collage. Reflecting his interest in non-objective abstraction, most of the works are untitled, referenced instead by a numbering system and date. As these works progressed, he often added string and other substrate materials and introduced marble dust and ball clay into commercial mediums, primarily Golden acrylics, manipulating the surface effects of his paintings. Mark Golden, creator of these mediums, was aware of Mackenzie’s experimental paint use even before the artist moved nearby.^[10]

A summary of Mackenzie’s varied yet consistent painting approaches can be glimpsed from a notecard on which he recorded his most significant influences. He lists: “Dorthea Rockburn, for drawing that makes itself.” “Ken Price, for historical/ambiguity, ceramic domes.” “Ron Davis – Richard Sera, for unconventional – early fiberglass way of painting / perspective.” “John McLaughlin – medative [sic] – reflection.” “Giorgio Morandi, for his focus – it took him a long time to become G. Morandi.”^[11] Mackey confirmed that he also often mentioned the work of Russian Supremacists, especially Kasimir Malevich.^[12] Not surprisingly, this list reflects Mackenzie’s ongoing interest in non-objective abstraction.

Activists at heart, Mackenzie and Mackey became involved in local politics, participating in the founding of a community garden and NUCSD [Neighbors United for Columbia Street District], for whom Mackenzie designed a logo and t-shirt. Mackenzie also was instrumental in bringing the BWAC [Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition] to the Red Hook Piers, which still holds exhibitions there today. There he met geometric abstract artist and curator James Little, who included Mackenzie in several exhibitions and introduced him to a number of abstract artists who informed his own abstract practice. These associations led to Mackenzie’s membership in the prestigious AAA (American Abstract Artists) group, which had been founded in 1936 to promote non-objective geometric painting in the United States. Founder of The Painting Center, New York, and daughter of artists Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason, abstract painter Cecily Kahn sponsored his membership application. In 2005, Mackenzie and Mackey relocated to Morris in upstate New York’s Mohawk Valley and purchased a firehouse in nearby Norwich. Characteristically, he renovated it into a studio space, carefully conceptualized in detailed plans and section drawings.

Beginning in 2007, around the time of his AAA membership, Mackenzie embarked on a series of paintings that would occupy him for the rest of his life. They were created on canvas in a traditional back to front manner and continued his use of string and built-up substrates. However, these works were decidedly more geometric, their abstract shapes creating spatial arrangements with perspectival resonance. This shift also coincided with a return to his use of more subdued colors and limited palettes. With these paintings, Mackenzie began to show regularly as an AAA artist both individually and in group exhibitions, including the Jersey City AAA exhibition “Small Works Show.” In 2011 Mackenzie was included in an international traveling exhibition in celebration of AAA’s 75th Anniversary, and in 2013 in American Abstract Artists: AAA 75th Anniversary Print Portfolio traveling exhibition. He also was represented in the 80th anniversary exhibition and catalogue of the AAA, The Onward of Art, 2015.

Having grown up in Orange County, Mackenzie was familiar with the nearby Mojave Desert. In 2009, he and Mackey bought property in the high desert town of Joshua Tree, dividing their time between New York in the summers and Joshua Tree from November through May. In 2010, an exhibition of works by Diane Best, a Joshua Tree artist showing at Bernard Leibov’s gallery BoxOFFICE, New York, introduced Mackenzie to her and the desert area’s art community more widely. Recognizing the influence of the Mojave Desert on his paintings, Leibov included works by Mackenzie in a 2012 New York exhibition of Joshua Tree artists. As was Mackenzie’s custom, once again in Joshua Tree he designed and built his own studio. Working with green architect Nicholas Holmes, he constructed the exterior cladding out of flat and corrugated steel that he rusted for an environmentally resilient finish to withstand the harsh desert climate.

In the Mojave Desert, Mackenzie also found a landscape that resonated with his AAA-inspired geometries, palette, and surfaces and further refined his paintings. He developed works that felt more expansive and were built up using layers and textures. The desert’s open spaces and distant vistas encouraged him to consider how line and perspective could move the viewer’s eye, but also body, around a canvas. And he began to emphasize the quality of the painted surface as much as the colors, which shifted into more subdued tones characteristic of the desert. In effect, working in Joshua Tree reinforced Mackenzie’s long-time interest in the art object, which had first drawn him to ceramics as a young artist. But now he was exploring paintings as dimensional objects, how they could encourage viewers to move around, slow down, and shift their perspectives. A press release for a 2018 exhibition of Mackenzie’s paintings in Joshua Tree with Boxo Projects and Asher Grey Gallery, states: “ His canvases share an affinity with deconstructivist architecture that breaks with modernism and invites the viewer to re-evaluate the reality they have created for themselves.” Mackey describes this interaction between the paintings and viewers as a visual and physical “choreography.”

Although long admired and recognized by other artists, Mackenzie first experienced commercial success with these desert-influenced paintings. The gallery Flow Modern in nearby Palm Springs gave him his first regular sales records. After living seasonally between Joshua Tree and New York for a decade, Mackenzie and Mackey moved to the desert full time in 2019. Mackenzie died in Joshua Tree, June 2020.

In addition to his inclusion in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, Mackenzie’s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1975, and a Pollock-Krasner grant in 2004. Collections featuring Mackenzie’s work include Art Embassies Program, U.S. Department of State; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and, in New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, Library Special Collections; New York Public Library, Special Collections. In California, Mackenzie’s work is in the Oakland Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Mills College Art Gallery; and the Rene di Rosa Foundation.

Biographical essay by Daniell Cornell subject to copyright.