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PAST EXHIBITION ::::
BRUCE McGAW: Paintings and Drawings
Opening Reception: Tuesday, September 23, 2008, 7:00 - 9:00pm
Exhibition Dates: September 23-October 4, 2008.
Free and open to the public.
For over five decades, Bruce McGaw’s paintings have explored and embraced his keen interest in the grand history of European painting, an interest often expressed through a carefully modulated deployment and adroit crystallization of three related elements. Those elements are the figure, color, and ideas of pictorial architecture that run the full gamut between the simple and the elaborately complex.
When these things are brought into their proper and optimal alignment, the pictorial results bespeak a perfectly balanced ordering of the eternal contest between complexity and coherence, which is, in and of itself, a significant accomplishment. What is even more important is the way that such orderings become philosophical models representing the ways and means by which the desire for such a balance can be profitably and durably satisfied, thereby reminding viewers of the fact that the crystallization of experience and desire can make improvements on the idea of order that is only implicit in the world of day-to-day experience. Even though it is no longer possible to make a historical claim for the universal validity of such models, they are still of great value because of their propositional status, which is to say, because they are useful at and for the moment of a given work’s creation, and maybe for a few, even many, more moments beyond that initial point of imaginative formulation.
The three elements that I have identified in McGaw’s work hark back to a traditional alchemy of meaning, Aristotle’s categories of pathos, logos, and ethos. Of course, because of the storytelling etiquettes derived from Hollywood, we now better know them in their more common guises of character, story, and world. Ostensibly, we would assume that this tradition-derived rhetorical model would cast the human figures pictured in McGaw’s paintings as being the work’s protagonists, naturally inviting our identification and summoning our sympathy. But this assumption is exactly the point where McGaw’s earlier, pre-1990 works threw their viewers a subtle change-up, because close scrutiny led one to gradually discover that their real protagonist was color or, to be more precise, the vivid and artful modulation of color as it related to light and atmosphere, creating a connective tissue that bridged visual pleasure and dramatic effect. In other words, we can say that the work draws a subtle analogy between the visual atmosphere that surrounds the objects of the world (including people) and the imperceptible (and implacable) workings of time upon those objects, energizing them at some moments and leaving them bereft in others, with color representing the diffuse life energy saturating the space that uses time to measure itself.
In the majority of works that McGaw has executed after 1990, color is still a significant element that entices and rewards the eye, but it is the figures and their narrative implications that come much closer to the work’s pictorial and philosophical foreground. For example, in Three Men, Three Doors (1996), we can see that the compositional bisection of the left and right side of the painting makes a stunning chromatic statement based on those almost impossible-to-modulate colors of green and red. But the three males figures contained in the composition are clearly pictured as actors rather than entities upon which color acts, even though their actions and motivations are mysteriously obscure and ambiguous.
In Children on a Hill (1995), we are again captivated by the vivid chromatics that suffuse the sky surrounding the depicted scene, and this is stunningly contrasted by other vivid hues saturating the garments worn by the work’s cast of pre-teen characters. But here, we also notice that the figures are presented as allegorical actors—a quintet of children arrayed about a precarious ladder perched upon the apex of a high hill. One blows a trumpet while another holds a bird in his hand. Still another practices a dance move, but the center of the composition is reserved for a boy who draws a picture while his young muse looks on with apparent interest and delight. Here, we have five of the traditional seven arts represented in an allegorical arrangement, but something still seems amiss. This is because it is merged with another very different allegorical construct that warns viewers about the impending fate of those who let lofty ambitions get the better of their dedication to pure purpose. Thus, the painting gives us a cautionary tale about the wages of art and celebrity, embodied in a sumptuous form.
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A very different tradition of allegorical drama is invoked by Amaterasu-Okami (2004), which takes a traditional Japanese creation myth as its subject. Someone not sensitive to the ancient story of the prehistorical sun goddess Amaterasu, who returns to the world after a period of banishment in a cave, might read the work as a portrayal of the Greco-Roman Persephone story, or perhaps as a politically tinged homage to Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (1823). Certainly, both paintings feature a swirling compositional structure built around a crowd of backlit witnesses to the revelation of a central mystery. But in McGaw’s hands, the surrounding darkness is recast as just another range of complex interlocking colors tending toward cooler albeit clearly differentiated hues, which operate in vivid contrast to Goya’s generic darkness of monotone finality. Seeing darkness as a realm of possibility (rather than one of finality) presents the viewer with an important lesson that is consistent with its creation-myth subject. That lesson is about seeing the mystery and richness in life’s shadows, this being a necessary psychological discipline that sustains sanity in troubled times. On this score, it is clear that Goya made a rather significant slip, although it is understandable that he did so under the dire circumstances in which he lived.
McGaw’s most recent works also focus on groupings of multiple figures. At first glance, they seem like straightforward renditions of suburban social encounters that take place very near his Richmond (California) studio. But they are not so straightforward. In many cases, the people portrayed therein seem to be looking past each other rather than interacting in a direct manner, and the houses pictured behind the figures seem to be set in an odd diagonal perspective, as if they were falling away from or into a given scene. In any given work, the clarity of the background might seem very general, almost abstract, while in other instances, specific elements are given a crystalline specificity. And finally, there is the ubiquitous presence of a nude goddess figure that stands radiantly among the pictured people, who seem oblivious to her presence, even as she steals the pictorial show from the standpoint of what the paintings reveal. Many of these recent works are painted on paper, and, no doubt, some are intended to be preparatory studies for larger works on canvas. But most seem to stand on their own as complete paintings in their own right. Very often they bespeak some rather wild and unpredictable combinations of different kinds of paint handling as well as different kinds of spatial articulation.
In one 2007 work titled View with Freeway, we see a trio of small figures in the work’s lower right hand corner, one of whom is getting ready to mount a bicycle. No wonder, because in the work’s middle ground we look down to see a horrendous traffic jam on the I-80, pictured from McGaw’s backyard. The windows of the vehicles seem improbably dark, like the eye sockets of so many skulls, and they all seem to be following a tanker truck pictured at the far right of the composition like a herd of death-bound lemmings. To add morbid insult to hydrocarbon injury, we also notice a fully laden oil tanker sailing out of the bay in the far background. In an era of $140 petrol barrels, this work provides a crystal-clear parable on the destiny of American energy policy. But this parable is placed in an entirely different context when we notice the rich and vibrant greens of the trees that are the true heroes of this painting. We cannot help but notice the care and inventiveness that McGaw brought to the articulation of these trees, which seem to have been taken from the forests of Matisse or late Cezanne, reminding us of better places and better days, while also infusing our own troubled time and place with a rich and absorbing consolation.
—Mark Van Proyen
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