STEVE McCLURE

Artist’s Statement

My paintings and works on paper combine precise narrative details with an atmospheric space that dissolves these details, manipulating the sense of foreground and background, matter and the void. In his book The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler makes a distinction between landscape and narrative in paintings. He suggests that landscape embodies the idea of endless time and that narrative is concerned with the immediate present. My recent work directly uses this idea to depict how narrative and landscape work against each other in a painting. The large painting, Lady Sawyers, is based on a black and white flash photo taken by John Collier for the Farm Security Administration in 1943. In the photograph, a group of women are caught in a small point in time and place, without past or future; in my painting they are allowed to become disintegrated, as in an ancient frieze, and have the freedom to live in a tragic space of History.

About Steve McClure

Steve McClure’s paintings, prints and works on paper have appeared in numerous group shows throughout the south and northeast, including New Prints at the International Print Center in New York City and Art on Paper at the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro. Recent solo exhibitions include My Bust Book at Bleu Acier in Tampa. He recently completed two winter Fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is the recipient of residencies from the Lower East Side Printshop, and the Bronx Museum of Arts.

Mr. McClure graduated from the University of South Florida with a Bachelor’s degree in 1995. In Tampa he opened (with Eric Breit) the Willie Shaker Gallery, a traveling exhibition space. While living in North Carolina (1996- 2004), he produced the experimental noise show CMP (1998-2001) on WXDU and reopened the Willie Shaker Gallery. He has an abiding interest in the works of Goethe and the visual history of whales.