STEVE McCLURE                                               Artist Statement

 (646) 591-9882  |   steve@mentiri.com

 

I paint ink and watercolor images on paper. They combine precise narrative details with an abbreviated atmospheric space.  A recent series of paintings, Dance Night, uses black and white flash photographs of dances in Pie Town, NM and Crowley, LA taken by Lee Russell for the Farm Security Administration. A sculpture The Problem with History Painting combines a figure carved out of plywood with a hatchet, and a horse that is actually a large parking barricade.

         Obsolete photographic treatises and their conflicts with painting have influenced my process and format.  IÕm interested in the concept of the cameraless photograph, the ideal of usefulness in an image, the aesthetics of class and the concept of originality. These watercolors appropriate the black, white and silver of B & W photography.  They are produced serially and often mimic the 4 x 5Ó format of photography. Like photography they use a simple process (ink absorbed into paper) and are informed by chance events like gravity and evaporation.