Robert McCann

My paintings are concerned with big themes like desire and loss, history and progress, entertainment, existence, and entropy.  I don’t begin paintings from a singular premise.  I will have several ideas and feelings I want to express, consciously and otherwise.  Some arrive on the front end, while other meaningful elements are found through the discursive process of layering figures, spaces, colors, marks, and materials.  I think of painting as fundamentally fictional and physical.  The construction of the image is activated by that winding together of hand and mind. 

I develop visual ideas initially from combination of different sources that range from YouTube video clips to personal photography to drawing invention.  I have a stack of notes with titles like “vacuuming with chairs on the table” and “Beverly Hillbillies colonizing Mars”.  I have folders with photos I’ve shot and imagery I’ve gathered, and I cut up, modify, and collage those things together to begin world-building before bringing it to the canvas.  Then in painting there is a back and forth between the picture and the abstraction of it.   I look for an outcome that is believable in some visceral way, while reading as an unreal, metaphorical situation. 

I often populate the work with pop culture figures of major and minor fame.  It will usually have a resonant connection for me, a point of personal mythology that stands in for some experience or memory.  It also serves as a shorthand for the portrayal of a particular kind of character that the viewer may recognize.  And I feel the internet and social media have flattened some of the barrier between celebrities and acquaintances, or between personal space and the news.  That off-kilter feeling of the public and private being drunk from the same firehose has been a theme in recent work.