Bruce McGaw

Paintings by Bruce McGaw

Fri., Nov. 21, 2008 – Sun., Feb. 1, 2009
Hallowell Gallery
Conversation with the Artist:  Fri., Nov. 21, 3:00 pm

 


In writing of artist Bruce McGaw, art critic Mark Van Proyen, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Studio Practice at the San Francisco Institute of Art states “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.”

 

Even as a young student of Richard Diebenkorn at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Bruce McGaw responded to the classicism and restraint of his instructor’s paintings. Of all the students at CCAC in 1955, McGaw perhaps benefited most from Diebenkorn’s mentorship as evidenced by his inclusion in the 1957 Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting exhibition presented by the Oakland Museum of Art. A life long student of art history, McGaw’s non-conformist work has also been informed by extensive experimentation with the art brut of Jean Dubuffet and the childlike inventiveness of Picasso; an interest in the discordant range of both the German Expressionists and the Fauves; a fascination with not only Dada but Zen; and a distinct admiration for the austerity of classicism.

McGaw’s recent solo exhibition at the Walter and McBean Galleries of the San Francisco Art Institute reinforced an ongoing unconventional approach to color as subject. It is a confirmation of the painter’s immersion in the historical sweep of European painting even though these paintings embrace exotic aspects of the New World. There is recognition of neighborhood and the activity of city life as well as the immigrant myths that enrich life in a new land. There is recognition of the richness of superstition configured into a deep and nourishing spirituality – an intensity of isolation and aloneness conveyed by not only the composition but more importantly by color. The philosophical meditations of these recent works carry a narrative bolstered by an austere pictorial architecture that is defined by that same vibrant but incongruent use of color.

The twelve large paintings for this exhibition have been selected from the San Francisco Art Institute survey exhibition that opened in late September. Enigmatic, powerful, strangely fluorescent, these most recent works by painter Bruce McGaw are deeply and passionately human. In these works he has given expression to his keen observations and internalization of the lives of the neighborhoods he lives between. This has been merged into his studies of the world’s great art and to his ongoing teaching career where the discipline of art is shared with his many students over a lifetime at the San Francisco Art Institute.