I am very excited, my Weekender readers, to introduce you to the work of master artist Paul McCrone! I would like to say that I have discovered him, but others, like his friend and agent Whitney Mulqueen of Goddess Creations gallery already beat me to that. I will instead try to help this young artist along by writing this admiring critique.
Paul is 33 years old and was born in Scranton of an Irish immigrant background. His grandfather worked in the mines in Archibald, and he thinks that there is something “bleak and black” in his work that came from those past mining experiences in his family.
He started painting when he was only four or five years old, but unlike many, he kept doing it. He won Best Artist awards in high school, and at age 19 he went to follow the educational path of Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe and attended The Arts Student League of New York. He stayed for two years and studied in many areas of art including life drawing, anatomy and painting. It was a largely classical and realist tradition that has served him well.
He did not stop at realism, though, and his work seems to be a move from a classical realism to a more expressionistic style. His work is “a combination of figurative and abstract subject matter,” and ambiguity and the blurring of distinctions is important in his work. Layering and using rough materials in with his paint is important to him, too. The Crucifixion and the “twisted torso” are both subject matters of his past art.
I interviewed him lately while he smoked his cigarettes. He reminded me of a sober and maybe kinder Pollock. He continued his non-artistic education on his own, and our discussion has ranged from literature (he is also a poet) to religion to philosophy, and he also knows the history of art quite well. Hesse and Nietzsche and Hegel and Celine and Dostoyevsky all came up in our mutual conversation.
Truth in art is important in Hegel — though not in many other philosophers of art — but it comes up in McCrone’s conversations and writings a lot. “Truth cannot be discerned though.” ■ “That brings me closer to truth.” ■ “I can best grasp this truth.” That’s a lot of talk about truth for an artist, though he mentions “beauty” too, of course. He is in his own way an intellectual, a philosopher and a seeker of truth.
He works in many media, including various types of sculpture, and usually paints in oils and often on unprimed canvas.
His influences, he states, are Vermeer, Caravaggio, Anselm Kiefer, Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Medar Rosso (the sculptor who influenced Rodin) and the Tachisme Movment of French Expressionism. I also see some De Kooning in him.
From Vermeer, you can feel the “momentary” nature of time, though in McCrone’s work there is a series of moments often blurred together. Lucien Freud is very important I think, with Bacon sifted through Paul’s creative mind, and the rough multiple lines of Giacometti are also often there.
I was surprised that he did not know the great recent work of the equally young British heir of Freud and Bacon, Jenny Saville. It makes his work even more impressive that he does not, since their work is similar in painting techniques in some ways. Their work is both dark — he says even Gothic — though hers has sometimes an obviously more bizarre subject matter.
There is a dreamlike Chagall quality to his work that is not in Freud’s or Saville’s work particularly, though it is evident in a sort of nightmare way in Bacon’s work, such as his screaming Pope.
I am commenting only on his great work “Ro” here, though I am presenting his work “Ur” also here and more will be in the online article, and his work also is shown with the artist on the Index page.
Everyone that I have shown his work to seems to like it. My friend and professor/critic Randy Padorr-Black says that finally a “painter who likes to paint!” and he predicted great things for him, as did my talented violinist brother Robert Anthony Woods
“Ro” is an small oil painting of 24 inches by 26 inches and to me is a real masterpiece — and one of the favorite paintings I have reviewed or even seen in the Scranton /Wilkes-Barre area in years. It could be shown in the best galleries of New York or Berlin or Tokyo. I think that as good as Paul is that he is still growing and will get even better yet!
“Transformation” is important in his work and “Ro” not only reminds me of a child that is part bird — maybe an angel even — but of a child becoming a bird or an angel. The child could be boy or girl or even a childlike adult. The work is highly and wonderfully mysterious. The child looks innocent but also looks like she knows something we don’t. There is something slightly dark and maybe even a little ominous to the image, with the dark blacks and blood reds of the background. Where does this child exist, in our world of space and time? In heaven, in hell?
Maybe the image is not ominous at all. Maybe all that black and red is the angel/child’s past only, his or her long journey to life. Maybe we are witnessing a great birth — the birth of an angel or a planet or every child trailing memories of heaven before her. Though his work is often highly androgynous, I tend to think of this person as a she, as wisdom is feminine in The Bible. The contrast of the brush strokes from realistic on the face to roughly expressionistic on the white, winged area is magnificent.
Paul McCrone’s work is presently on display in April at Goddess Creations in Clark Summit, and then he will be in a small group show for First Friday in May at The Scranton Club.
I say then to this young master, with sparks of genius in his work; like your great winged being: Fly, fly to artistic heaven in your future works, for I believe that you can make it there!
w
| Tweet | Follow @wkdr |
|
|
