| Book - $22.99 | |
| Case of Books - $310.00 |
William McCullough, Southern Painter
in conversation with
William Baldwin, Southern Writer
Compiled by Currie McCullough
Softback 96pp. $22.99
(History Press, Charleston, South Carolina) 2006
Excerpts from the Book :
Recent Reviews :
Major Man: William McCullough, Southern Painter
William McCullough, Southern Painter
in conversation with
William Baldwin, Southern Writer
Compiled by Currie McCullough
Softback 96pp. $22.99
(History Press, Charleston, South Carolina) 2006
Opportunities to quote from my favorite American poet, Wallace Stevens, have been turning up with agreeable regularity. Section viii of the first part of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” begins with this question:
Can we compose a castle-fortress-home,
Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc,
And set the MacCullough there as major man?
This book and its complement, the retrospective exhibition at the City Gallery (May 20-August 12), equip us to answer Stevens’ rhetorical question with a specific affirmative. This McCullough is a major figure in contemporary American art, just as his namesake Horatio McCulloch (1805-1867) was in 19th-century Scottish painting. The book and exhibition celebrating his 40-year career clearly establish him as a major realist painter of the final third of the 20th century, as Robert Henri was for the first.
One of the pleasures of text and image is that they enable us to see the genealogies of McCullough’s influences. Through his teachers and theirs he can trace a direct pedagogical descent from Robert Henri; he is also descended by way of influence from a number of older and some Old masters. Some of the images bring Cézanne to mind, especially No. 29, the portrait of Pauline, and No. 84, Pocotaligo Cedars, painted only last year, but surely with Cézanne’s pine-tree portraits at the back of its palette-mind. Another aspect of his artistic roots emerges when he considers the chain of title of his subject-matter, musing on Hopper’s Charleston paintings (exhibited at the Gibbes from tomorrow): “Of course, to someone like Edward Hopper who did come here to paint, it was too beautiful. He was too much of a Puritan, I suspect.”
Acutely conscious of how the Lowcountry has changed over his six decades, he has always been interested in conservation, and is a faithful supporter of the Lowcountry Open Land Trust. The gorgeous cover painting, Daws Island Afternoon (1997) is a perfect poster child for the work the Land Trust does to preserve such vistas. Preservation of the city’s architecture is, McCullough realizes, a mixed blessing for the artist. His cityscapes concentrate on an area, roughly Radcliffeboro and Cannonboro, that has not yet been gentrified to — not death, but architectural amber. He confesses, “I don’t paint in those over-preserved neighborhoods. Too precious. Too pretty. The prettiness is in conflict with the picturesqueness.” His affinity for the poetry of architectural decay characterized the first McCullough that made a deep impression on me, one in a series of an abandoned single house (No. 48, 65 Cannon I; 1990) before it was restored in the mid-1990s.
A cogent Foreword by Bradford Collins of the University of South Carolina, “William McCullough and the Realist Saga,” traces the long history of the realist tradition in Western painting, so McCullough is in context even before Bill Baldwin begins to draw him out, as he does with mastery of his own. Baldwin’s extensive experience in collaborations of this sort has taught him his is the art of self-effacement. He is the facilitator, not the star; with questions and observations he coaxes from Bill a self-portrait in words worthy to stand with the arresting ones in oils here illustrated. Baldwin turns talk to his upbringing, to the many mentors who guided the kid who liked to draw towards a top-tier professional career. McCullough begins by worrying about sounding judgmental. He had nothing to fear on this front, for no paybacks or score-settlings darken these genial pages. He abides by the old Southern notion that silence is best when you cannot muster something nice, as when he touches on his alma mater, the then Baptist College: “Their art department was in its infancy…to be kind.”
The title emphasizes both men’s status as specifically Southern artists, and on the conversation’s first page the painter begins to walk round the concept of Southernness, studying it as he would a bowl of pears before picking up his pencil. In this initial glance he admits, “The South is such a complicated place.” His relationship with the land of his birth has been complex as well. He acknowledges that, like many other gifted sons of the Lowcountry, he could not wait to get out; most of his training was in New York. He did not stay on to “make it” professionally in the outsize world of New York, saying modestly of coming home instead, “I’ve gotten to do a lot of interesting things—due to my lack of success.” McCullough feels that painting is a bit of an orphan discipline in the South: “I still see Romanticism in the South as being more often found in literature. We’re like Ireland. A literary place not a painting place.” In recent decades few have done more than this man to make the South a painting place.
A major turning point was 1980, when on his father’s death he came home from North Carolina to help his mother bring in the recently planted crops. McCullough recognizes that the extraordinary products of his planter-painter period remain among his best —witness The Sheep Shearer (No. 15; 1982). He began spending more time in Charleston, acquiring a house on upper Rutledge around which he built an ambitious series of paintings. The hometown prophet who portrayed the ungentrified twilight of the west side was not what Charleston buyers craved, and most of these paintings were sold in Greenville and Charlotte. The former city has always been especially appreciative of his work. The Greenville Museum of Art, home of a magnificent collection of Southern art, recently acquired a major painting from his annual French sojourns, No. 80, St. Mediers in Spring (2004), in which his treatment of light in the south of France is very different from that suffusing a sea island.
He refuses to make painting something rarefied, finding that the best critics are those who like the painter “work with their hands.” In sharp contrast to the situation in France he describes with humor and affection, he observes that in Charleston when he sets up on the street no one comes near the easel: “People are so preoccupied with going and getting they don’t pay attention.” William McCullough does pay attention: Book and exhibition record the fierce integrity of his attention-paying over four decades. He still approaches each surface, each trick of light with a sense of profound wonder, rousing the same sense in the alert observer. A man who has always followed his own eye, his own heart, he is indifferent to fashion, contemptuous of commercial trends: “If you guess at people’s taste, the result is bad art.”
In a final twist Baldwin reveals that his subject once taught him portrait painting, so he is conversing not only as old friend but as grateful former pupil. The conversation closes with McCullough’s extended statement on his philosophy of teaching, which grew out of the way he works himself. For all he is a learned painter conversant with the whole range of Western art, William McCullough knows that he is a painter, not a philosopher, and his art is still centrally “about preparing the canvas, drawing, applying the pigments.” He makes no grandiose claims for his paintings, the natural outgrowths of his character, his passions, his artistic and regional heritage. An autumnal note sounds when the painter feels his 58 years: “It’s winter. That’s the self-portrait. I’m a deciduous tree. My leaves have dropped off.” His paintings of Cannonboro are suffused with an elegiac quality; as a group, these are I believe his finest achievement, an historical as well as artistic record of a neighborhood experiencing profound change.
The 30-page Conversation contains two dozen illustrations in the wide margins. Following the prose comes “The Paintings of William McCullough,” 50 pages, the majority full-page reproductions of individual works — a feast indeed! Their variety is particularly impressive. I had always vaguely thought of Bill as primarily a landscape and cityscape painter. He is that, one of our finest, but he is so much more! Here are exquisite nudes, portraits, still lifes and domestic interiors. Perhaps the most characteristic paintings are those in which interior and exterior meet as windows and doors open to the outside world: the early No. 32, Still Life with Violin (1975), No. 63, The Screen Door (1994) and No. 94, Broadman Hymnal (2003). His views from the piazza — Nos. 51, Rutledge Avenue Banana Tree, and 65, The Porch (both 1994) — are utterly delicious (if I might afford just one tiny sketch…).
History Press has a reputation for quality of design, printing and presentation. William McCullough, Southern Painter is the most beautifully produced volume I have seen from this house. The press and the compiler, the painter’s daughter Currie McCullough, have done this major painter proud. If (Heaven forfend!) you purchase only one art book this year, this is my candidate. And if you make it to but one of Spoleto’s visual offerings, be certain it is to the City Gallery to marvel at William McCullough’s work. The book’s glorious illustrations should only increase appetite for the works themselves. As the painter cautions, “A plate in a book is very different from a real painting.” Go and see these 64 real paintings and pastels, and savor the Southernness of a painter who has been a farmer, who remains close to the land, who has never lost touch with the community in which he grew up and whose most distinguished son he has become.
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William McCullough, Southern Painter, in conversation with William Baldwin, Southern Writer, The History Press, Release Date May 18th, 2006.
With an artistic appreciation for the world surrounding him that springs forth from each inspired brushstroke, Southern realist painter William McCullough has produced a truly remarkable body of work in his celebrated forty-year career. From a stately stand of plantation oaks awash in the stark light of dusk to the weathered boards of a Charleston single house shaded by palmettos, McCullough captures as no one else the quiet grandeur of his diverse subjects.
This enthralling new book features an extraordinary selection of McCullough’s work, coupled with a conversation between the Southern artist and Southern writer William Baldwin—two of the most creative contemporary Southern minds. Differing in medium but strikingly similar in perspective and approach, these two keepers of a region’s artistic tradition offer unparalleled insight into the dynamic of the South.
“While the so-called post-modernist heirs of the modernists continue to pursue novelty, realists such as William McCullough would prefer to remind us of the extraordinary beauty of light on the side of a house. In a time when the survival of this lovely little blue planet has come into question, this is not an insignificant thing.” --Bradford Collins, PhD, Professor of Art History, The University of South Carolina.
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William McCullough is a true Southern talent and authentic observer and chronicler of culture and place; painting faithfully without gimmick or pretense, he can translate the commonplace into painted objects called fine art.
- West Fraser, 2006
