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HARRY McCORMICK
REFLECTS ON THE SUBJECTS OF HIS PAINTINGS
Nowadays when people say what
it is that I paint, they say interiors, bars, and beautiful women—that’s
all they relate to. If I say I want to paint parks as I am starting to
do now, people cannot seem to break away from what they know. Some will
say “oh no, don’t do that…you do the beautiful bedroom
scenes so well.”
Reflecting on the 40 years
that I have been painting, I have to remind myself of the different periods
of my career as an artist. There was a time when I painted old and worn
out garbage cans and people bought them and thought they were beautiful.
I would wander around New York City looking for old buildings with shadows
of fire escapes on the wall. Or I would seek out a Bowery bum going through
a trash can. An artist friend once said that nobody knows where this stuff
comes from and he is right. It comes from the subconscious. That is why
when someone asks “Why did you paint that” they get only a superfluous
answer. At that time I would look and look and when I saw it I would know
that it is a painting. But now it comes from inside as well or in segments,
ideas that I am just talking about…
There are times when subject
material just runs out as in the case of the old railway stations or platforms.
I grew up across the street from a railroad station and I remember the
diesels and the big steam engines puffing smoke right across the street.
They vanished right before my eyes—the old railway stations were
harder and harder to find.
When I was a boy growing up
in Bayonne, New Jersey there were old ruins of ships in the water all
around the city, As a boy we would swim and dive off of them. The water
was polluted with raw sewage but we never got sick These ships always
had a hint of mystery for me. Some of them looked like old pirate ships
all made of weathered wood, I did a series of paintings of them. There
was another artist (a Bayonne local) named John Noble who painted them
a lot better than me.
Old glass bottles and jewelry
fascinated me. I did many still lives of bottles; I became interested
in stained glass windows and studied a little with a man named Frederick
Cole in Nonington, England. He was a wonderful man who was in charge of
maintaining the 11th century stained glass windows at the Canterbury Cathedral;
I would be painting in the front of the studio and am making a stained
glass window in the back. I had a huge studio at the time in New Your
City with an Aikido school downstairs. The floor would shake and vibrate
when they practiced and I would have to paint on a vibrating canvas at
all times. It didn't bother me since I did Aikido also.
During a certain period I
had a studio in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. I was painting strictly
Mexican subjects at that time. There was allot of interesting subject
material in the fruit and vegetables markets at that time. The contrast
of the cloth covered fruit stalls with the sun on the covers and the dark
underneath with the brightly colored fruit underneath was great. The faces
of the people were very interesting.
I’ve always done outdoor
cafes and genres scenes, trying to capture people unawares. During the
mid-70s, I was asked to do a bicentennial piece and noticed an American
flag at MacManus Bar on 19th Street and 7th Avenue near my studio. I did
a bar scene called 'The Veteran' and it was so popular I decided to keep
painting bars. Everyone relates to bars in some way, people go to bars
for all sorts of reasons—they are magical. There is an endless variety
of décor in bars, and an endless variety of people too. Lots of
subject material, I have been painting bars and restaurants for almost
30 years. Sometimes I am in a bar and look a certain kind of barstool
and think, I must have painted that exact type of stool a hundred times,
what a strange way to earn a living. I still do not feel that I have exhausted
the subject, People must think that I drink allot, but I don’t. The
bars in a small town in Mexico all have wicked and dangerous sounding
names, like ‘El Diablo’ or ‘El Gato Negro’ (the Black
Cat). I do not know, maybe bars are where tough guys are supposed to go.
Whether it is a bar or a beautiful
room, it is not the room itself but the light that is important. I like
beautiful interiors and have painted some great mansions in Newport, Rhode
Island, Palm Beach, Miami—all inspiring in their elegance.
Graphics have been something
that I have always been involved with form the 1960’s with lithography
on stone. I worked with Burr Miller on 22nd Street; his father did the
original ‘Stag at Sharkeys’ by George Bellows. I think this
is the most recognized graphic by an American artist. I studied one summer
at Pratt Institute to learn copper plate etching which is still my favorite
medium, although there is not a big public demand for etchings. I still
have my old spider wheel etching press with mehere in Florida. I was doing
serigraph (silkscreen) printing for maybe 15 years and coming closer and
closer to the reproduction of the painting. After printing more than 50
colors by hand I finally had had it with the serigraph medium. It was
so much work that I think it took some years off my life,
Now, a dream has comes true
for me due to the computer age and the emergence of the Giclee
technology. The Giclee medium reproduces my paintings faithfully,
it duplicates the look of the manyglazes that add depth and realism to
my paintings. It gives me the reproduction that that I had striven so
may years to create through silkscreen at great cost in labor, time and
money. Artists in general love the Giclee medium but there are a few who
are against it. They feel that the poor artist must work his fingers to
the bone. I say to hell with them, if giclees were around in Rembrandt’s
time, there would be giclees of ‘The Night Watch’ in museums
all around the world.
So now my new subject material
is parks—people in them, hot dog stands, sketch artists, and people
walking dogs and picking up after them too. View Harry's new
park paintings at the Wit gallery in Lenox, MA.
—Harry McCormick, Boca
Raton FL May 16, 2004
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