| Click here to read the Register Guard article about David McCosh. The Night Drawings of David McCosh
“The significance of my [work] rests on an affirmation of faith – that reality cannot be invented – that emotions must be genuine and that honest painting holds a unique position which no other activity or form can replace.” David McCosh, Sabbatical Proposal. 1953.
“I would say that Cezanne in starting to draw a given situation asked himself “how do I know” not “what do I know”… Cezanne doesn’t pretend to know anything – he states as honestly as he can in painting equivalents the causes he has been able to discern in the situations that produce knowledge. Knowing is the result, not the cause.” David McCosh, Lecture on Cezanne.
In the Night Drawings, McCosh purposefully separated the act of drawing from his observation of any subject other than the drawing itself. These drawings were made at night, in his studio, not on site while he was observing a specific subject. He didn’t even base them on sketches that he had made previously of a specific subject, as was often his practice. As he drew he had in mind the northwest landscape situations, as he called them, that he had observed for years - the entanglements and twisting spaces created by dense vegetation, the cathedral lighting of the forest, the colors reflected off a sunlight stream – but he asked as he worked – how do I know these things? How do I see them?
To answer these questions he stated with paint, or ink, or watercolor, the elements of the landscape situation as he saw them. He wasn’t trying to make a photographic-like summary of a visual experience. He wanted instead a piece by piece reconstruction of the activity and the elements that comprise how we see. The carefully placed marks and calligraphic lines in the black and white Night Drawings are intended to create entanglements with their shifting and twisting spaces in the same way that a careful observer sees them. McCosh said that what he knew was the result of how he saw a situation. The Night Drawings show us his process of observation, which at times was deliberate and meticulous and at other times, as in the Night Drawings with multiple colors, it moved quickly with great energy and emotional engagement.
When I first began to study the Night Drawings I wondered if they were technical exercises which McCosh designed so that he could focus on the elements of painting and drawing – the ability of the brush, for example, to make marks that sometimes surprise the painter with their individual character and which suggest a direction for the next set of marks that is different from what the painter had been thinking. The Night Drawings may have had that original purpose, but these works became more than a record of his observations, even more than a demonstration of how he observed landscape situations. He explores in this work the potential of painting to create essence – to create meaning as poetry and music does, not through a literal description of the world, but through the creation of a work of art that states the essence of an experience in a form we all can share.
Is the complexity of these tangled webs the essence that McCosh is after? His point seems to be finding the pattern, the structure which brings order and life to the complexity we see. The Night Drawings aren’t intended as chaotic experiences, but as examples of order. They are the experiences of an individual who through painting discovered something that goes beyond what he was able to observe. This is what makes painting unique among activities or forms of artistic expression. McCosh is not often thought of as a spiritual painter, whose work reflects or participates in ideas that transcend painting itself. But the Night Drawings and his related late works have a spiritual dimension that results from McCosh’s discovery of order, structure, simplicity in complex and chaotic environments.
This is the fifth in a series of shows at the Karin Clarke Gallery that have presented various aspects of McCosh’s long journey as a painter. I intentionally waited to show the Night Drawings until now because they embody a philosophy of painting he developed during a lifetime of study and practice. But there is another quality about them which shouldn’t be missed. Many of the works in this show have an extraordinary freshness about them, with colors as bright and vivid as the day they were laid down. They were made 40 to 50 years ago, yet they haven’t aged or changed and maybe they never will. They are like visitors from another time. This must have been what Henry James had in mind when he wrote about seeing great paintings from other eras:
“As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries had only sweetened their freshness. The same faces, the same figures looked out at different worlds, knowing so many secrets, the particular world didn’t, and when they joined hands they made the indestructible thread on which the pearls of history were strung.” Henry James, “The Tragic Muse”.
Roger Saydack
November, 2009.
Bio:
David McCosh was born in Cedar Rapids, IA in 1903. He studied at Iowa’s Coe College and the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1926. McCosh traveled and painted for two years in Europe on a John Quincy Adams Scholarship exhibiting his works in a one-man show upon his return in 1929. By 1931, his works were included in shows in New York and Chicago. This initiated an active schedule of exhibitions that McCosh would sustain for over forty years.
David and Anne McCosh, Mexico, 1966
McCosh began his teaching career at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the summer months, at the Stone City Art Colony in Iowa with his friend, Grant Wood. In 1934, however, after his marriage to fellow artist, Anne Kutka, McCosh accepted a position in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon in Eugene teaching drawing, painting, and lithography. He continued in this position until his retirement in 1970. During these years, McCosh exerted a strong influence on the direction of painting in the Pacific Northwest and trained several generations of students, many of whom went on to gain their own renown.
McCosh’s early work expresses the modern interest in scenes of contemporary life for which he received acclaim in major exhibitions in New York and Chicago. This focus would undergo a fundamental alteration, however, in the years following his move to the Northwest. Responding to the lush environment quite unlike what he was accustomed to in Iowa, McCosh allowed his Midwest regionalism to fall away. Gradually, he adjusted his painting practices to include a greater interest in an observation of nature that would become the dominant focus of his work for the remainder of his painting career.
In 1949, the year of his first sabbatical, McCosh began a phase of intermittent periods of travel that eventually proved essential to the development of his mature style. Seeming to revel in extremes, McCosh and his wife Anne ventured in the fall of 1949 into remote regions of the Washington Coast followed by several months in Mexico and New Mexico. Responding to the dramatic differences in his surroundings, McCosh allowed color to emerge as an organizing force in his compositions. He would later refer to this period as a major turning point in his career.
Always circumspect about the idea of abstract art, McCosh remained steadfast in his belief that painting always found its basis in observation--the people, the animals, and the landscapes that surrounded him. From this perspective, McCosh’s mature, and highly personal style became a record of the visual vocabulary he developed responding to what his experienced eye had learned to see.
McCosh received national recognition throughout his painting career spanning over forty years. His one-man, juried and invitational exhibitions took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the University of Oregon Museum of Art, among many other venues. After his retirement in 1970, McCosh continued to live and paint in Eugene. He died in 1981.
Teaching Positions:
Instructor, Stone City Art Colony, Stone City, IA, 1932-33
Instructor in Lithography, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1932-34
Professor of Art, Department of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and Allied Arts, University of Oregon, 1934 – 1970
Guest Artist, Montana State University, 1953
Guest Artist, San Jose State University, 1957 Click here to view the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art David McCosh web page Click here to read the December 2009 Register Guard article on David McCosh show
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