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Notes: 1 / 2 years ago
An artist statement for a residency proposal I submitted today…
Artist Statement
“I Love You, Monster”
By Paul McLean
The painting cycle that I’m hoping to complete during the residency is a vital component of a major artistic production, conceived to unfold on a 14-year timeline (starting in 2009), punctuated by multiple exhibitions and ultimately the presentation of a new American opera. The title, “I Love You, Monster (ILUM),” is the utterance of a young child named Christian, the son of friend and long-time collaborator (1983-present) JP Keyes and his wife Julie. The content of the ILUM series of paintings relates to volumes of text and research on art, economics and social topology derived through and expressed as dimensional analysis, including my recent thesis work. The ILUM themes, it should be noted, do include autoportrait elements, some of which date to the late 80s (e.g., “Where My Feet Stick to the Ground,” an exploration of my Scottish ancestry) and even earlier - such as the labor history threads inspired by my mother’s historical research on Mother Jones and industrial labor. The work to my mind is definitely located in American cultural sensibilities.
The central figure in ILUM is the cyclops, who is the first character I ever developed for visual narrative (first appearing in 1982, and recurring in most of my major painting cycles since). The cyclops is a complex dimensional construct, with mimetic features. The rendering approach is variable, ranging from lo-brow in the manner of the graphic novel, to art historical as a stylized “resample.” It is precisely the cyclops’ adaptability that I find most valuable formally. I am able to introduce photographic, graphic and canonical materials in a context that flattens the content within the narrative arc of the painting cycle. Essentially, the cyclops functions similar to an application, or a filter for composite, as in a software/hardware environment like Photoshop, which also builds images dimensionally. One difference - and there are several significant ones between digitally fabricated pictures and those made using traditional media - involves the additive progression of paint to canvas, culminating in a finish. In painting, I tend to emphasize the surface distinctions among new and traditional media with texture, and blur it with light sensitive or directional effects and products. The cyclops as an agent, however, can migrate among media like Neo in the Matrix movies.
During my MFA course at Claremont Graduate University (2006-7), I prepped dozens of substrates for painting, while focusing on mostly digital media as finished objects for collective and solo projects. It became clear over this production cycle that artistically I was undergoing a kind of systematic regression, inspired by the work of Donald Judd (whose I work I travelled to visit in Marfa, Beacon, NYC and D.C., after first becoming interested in it in LA in the mid00s). Based on these experiences with Judd’s art and his contemporaries’, especially Sol LeWitt and Lee Bontecue, I determined, in a way, to break down my aesthetic engine, in order to rebuild it, modernize it (informed by 3D and Judd’s ideas on “Specific Objects”) and make it more powerful and effective. At the time I had little or no idea that my reflective or inner aesthetic processing would lead eventually to a re-animation of my earliest artistic experiments and the cyclops.
My Arts Management thesis studies (an examination of Peter Drucker mentored by Drucker expert Joseph Maciariello and others) also have had a strong influence on these paintings, which are to some degree a reaction against Management theory as a Liberal Art in a Humanities framework. The ILUM paintings do also confront critical discourse, and other derivatives of 20th century sociological and psychological schema. The cyclops is more aligned with dreaming, in a tribal sense, than any Jungian interpretation, for instance. By early 2008, in the fifth “Content” iteration for exhibit (at Timothy Yarger Fine Arts in Beverly Hills), I realized that the myopic Everyman with his mouth sewn closed would play a significant dramatic role, as the pictorial representation of man in the Corporate Age.
Finally, the coloration of many of the paintings - lots of flourescents - reflects my exposure at an impressionable age (my early 20s) to the wild art of mid-80s Lower East Side, NYC. More subtly, the use of hot color is a reaction to the smog of LA. The color in the series is one reason the execution of larger artworks in the series is so important. The visceral impact of these high-intensity pigments is, I suspect, magnified exponentially by expanding the presentation format past human scale. I believe the 10’ tall cyclops will be much more intense than the 10” version. After completing over 70 pieces, as of this writing, I am very much excited by the vision of cyclops painted in mural dimensions.
