My work grows out of looking at other art, from living, and from lots of drawing. The sources include African, pre-Columbian, and Eskimo art, so-called primitive art, art by mental patients, untrained artists, and children.

The work looks, I hope, spontaneous. However, it's not easy being simple; that's where the drawing comes in. The drawings are made with pen or pencil on cheap paper and function as visual notes to myself, notes that can be altered as I move from idea to execution. Because I also make sculpture and prints, the ideas and images used in those other mediums find their way, inevitably, into the paintings. Travel influences my work, too; places I've been, people I've met, meals that I've eaten, all may appear in the paintings.

Despite the preparatory drawings, when I begin a painting I try to have a direct response to what's happening on the canvas. I try to be open to a happy accident when it comes along. It's often difficult to know as I work just where a particular image comes from, what it's about. Months or years later, though, I'll realize, Oh, yeah, that was about that trip to France when it rained for three weeks, or a truly amazing fresco in a dimly-lit Italian church, or that time I fell and hurt my knee.

I'm not sure what it all means. I try hard to make the most beautiful, mysterious, most colorful, funniest, and truest paintings I can. And, once in awhile, I succeed.

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Todd McKie loves outsider art, primitive art, eskimo art, african art, pre-columbian art, children's art, old people's art, crazy art,and funny art.

His own paintings, prints, sculptures, and drawings are humorous and colorful. Mckie's paintings are often provocative and strange. McKie is a graduate

of RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design. Todd McKie lives in Boston, but has exhibited his work in galleries and museums throughout the United

States and in Europe. McKie's art has been exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Institute of

Contemporary Art, the Fogg Museum, Rose Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the RISD Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the

Addison Gallery of American Art, Lincoln Center, the Norton Museum, and other museums.