Biography
Steven McCallum was born in Alliance, Ohio in 1951.
He received his B.F.A.and M.F.A. in painting and drawing at Kent State University.
In 1981 he moved to New York City, where over the years he had the opportunity
to work as an assistant to Al Held, James Rosenquist and Helen Frankenthaler.
Steve's paintings are in the collections of The Cleveland Museum of Art,
the San Diego Museum of Art, The Butler Institute of American Art,
The Tampa Museum of Art, The Ringling Museum of Art,
and The Polk Museum of Art.
He is also represented in major corporate collections
both in the United States and abroad.
Steven McCallum: Jitterbugging into the Millennium
With so many cute conceptual strategies, philistine-pandering anti-art attitudes, and mass media-influenced
gimmicks currently are conspiring to turn the art world into A three-ring circus. It is gratifying to be jolted back to
an awareness of how genuinely exhilarating painting can be when it is practiced with the lively combination of talent, thoughtfulness, and integrity that we see in the work of Steven McCallum, whose solo show is at Allan Stone Gallery, 113 East 90'th Street, from January 9 to February 20.
Here is a painter steeped in art history, yet possessed of a personal style so totally of the moment that we are immediately struck by the freshness of his approach. The initial impact of his works results from, the sheer exuberance of McCallum's paintings, with their vibrant hard-edge color areas and their generally large scale. But there is something ever more startling about those canvases and that is their sheer expressiveness, inexplicably unhampered by the constraints that one normally associates with paintings so precise, so meticulously made. (McCallum employs color charts to plan hi palette and masking tape to execute his paintings, yet arrives at a
sense of freedom through some mysterious stylistic alchemy peculiarly his own.)
Comparisons to Al Held, for whom McCallum once worked as a studio assistant, are inevitable and not inaccurate, particularly in the tendency of both painters to gleefully violate the supposed sanctity of the modernist picture
plane by introducing illusions of linear perspective into an abstract context - a no longer crucifiable offense since
the dawning of the postmodern era.
However, McCallum's compositions are considerably more intricate and complex than those of the older painter, defying the reductivism that some have put forth as yet another sacred tenet of advanced abstract art. Perhaps their layered maximalism has more in common with the recent wall reliefs of Frank Stella, although McCallum, by virtue of his cooler technique, is considerably more successful in controlling the chaos that is automatically courted when so many variables of color and pattern are put simultaneously into play. In fact, McCallum creates harmony out of potential chaos, weaving dazzlingly diverse elements into a holistic formal synthesis, with all manner of hot-hued geometric forms - circles, grids, rectangles, and zigzagging lines - interacting in a crazy kinetic shuffle that demonstrates just how alive and kicking abstract painting still is as we jitterbug into the millennium.
With their bright, flat comic strip colors, Hellzapoppin compositions, and jazzy vernacular titles ("Zydeco Z's" refers
to funky accordian-dominated mode of pop music native to New Orleans and "Aberration of the Madguy" is punningly self-explanatory), as well as their way of making a personal vocabulary of abstract forms allude to all manner of down to earth subjects, the paintings of Steven McCallum belong to an aggressive and heroic American tradition that includes artists so stylistically disparate as Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning. Yet McCallum is his own wild and crazy postmodern guy, and his unique approach to color, shape, space, and pattern adds a whole
new idiom, at once elegant and slangy, to the language of cotemporary abstraction.
Ed McCormack, Gallery&Studio
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My Teaching Philosophy Work Work hard Work intelligently Accept no substitutes Work Develop one's skills on an ongoing basis Use sound studio practices Experiment Respect the craft Color - know it Be productive Prioritize Have a soul Possess visual and sensory awareness Take encouragement Have a working knowledge of art history Develop a sense of aesthetic heritage Work Color - know it Learn responsible integration of current theoretical and aesthetic concerns Look at as much art as possible Exhibit self-confidence Foster departmental interaction Have stamina Make the commitment Be familiar with theories of perception Color - know it Employ sound modes and means of visual organization Experiment Work Applaud acceptance graciously Applaud rejection with renewed determination Gesture wildly Sit quietly Work Learn to live within your own skin Exercise physically Exercise mentally Use your vocabulary Invent a vocabulary Confront adversity with all of your resources Have respect Work - Everything else will find its place |
Picasso once said - "... artists are either obsessed or possessed ...".
Obsessed or possessed about what? I think about the human spirit; how our world goes on. Artists question, evaluate, re-evaluate, step back, step forward, replenish, revitalize, assert themselves, and work. Always optimistic, ever optimistic, artists must be vigilantly productive in their quest to find yet another reason to go beyond.
Beyond what societal convention, education, genetic disposition, money, fun, hopefulness, happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction have led us to believe is creative success.
As artists, it is our responsibility to envision, encourage and demand experimentation and individualism that will sustain our development as humans and maintain a level
of civility that accurately defines our willingness to survive and prosper.
Steven McCallum
McCallum's Garden: Some thoughts on the nature of abstraction
The paintings abstract artist Steve McCallum will be exhibiting at the Mira Mar Gallery, from July 15 through Aug. 29, span a 10-year period. The exhibit is entitled "Another Look." He will also be the featured artist, July through October, at the Polk Museum in Lakeland.
A graduate of Kent State, McCallum has been a studio assistant to Al Held, Helen Frankenthaler and James Rosenquist, all-important American painters. Today, McCallum is one of a number of artists who form an active art community, centered around Rosenquist, in Aripeka, a small town north of Tampa.
What is noticeable in looking over the time span of his work is that the artist's design motifs have become simplified. His bands and grids of rhythmic bright color have become quieter in a linear sense but not in color. His characteristic device of a vortex, spinning toward the interior space of his paintings while simultaneously coming toward the viewer, is still in evidence in the new paintings.
In some instances, he combines the vortex with a new, central textural panel suggesting grass or bulrushes. But, as in the past, bars of black or dark blue contain the flow of his color as they move backward and forward in space.
His agitated lines and long curves of the mid '80s are now reduced in number and complexity to fewer planes of recession in which the lines and colors traverse. "Yella Unit" of 1986 is busier and closer to the dynamics of drawing than "elapse," 1997, which is nearer to the reasoned harmonics of architecture.
The new paintings echo the fluid, abstract grid patterns and color harmonies of the mid-century American master Stuart Davis (1894-1964), but within a simplified grid system with fewer and thicker bars of black or blue. It is a far cry from McCallum's images of 10 years ago. Davis, in fact, painted at the top of his painting "The Paris Bit" (1959) the words "Lines Thicken." McCallum's new paintings reflect his empathy with that sentiment, and this new development works for him.
The freshness and energy of these abstract paintings raise an issue central to this community's cultural well-being. Will the presence of this exhibition of serious contemporary art have an impact on the judgment of the areas art enthusiasts? Is there enough perspicacity in this town for viewers to snap themselves out of the habit of visiting only galleries that exhibit spiritless, second-hand confections of earlier styles of art?
Art is always about meaning; only styles change, and we must reconcile ourselves to these limitations. Acknowledging this, McCallum's abstract painting's can be seen as an authentic expression, which nonetheless reflects a tradition of abstraction to which the artist adheres.
When looking at a work of abstract art, the observer must be less inclined to ask, "What does it mean?" and more open to the question "How does it feel?" American culture, above all else, is a scientific culture; the hallmark of progress for the majority is scientific progress. This leads people to a propensity to give "realism" priority over other forms of artistic expression.
Historically, abstraction has been viewed at best unsympathetically and at worst as a sinister form of high-brow duplicity on the part of its practitioners. Because of this, such art, devoid of any "objective" scientific rendering of the world, is difficult for many to relax in front of and enjoy as pure color and form. An abstract painter's emotional universe in this cultural climate - with its bias toward recognizable form - too often is a closed one, responded to by only a depressingly small group of collectors and artists themselves.
It need not be this way if a viewer of such work disassociates looking at abstract art from the last century's tradition of placing emphasis on subject matter, and perhaps simply sees the subject as color and line, evoking an internal reality rather than an external one.
An abstract painter premises the theatre of his emotional ideas as one separate but equal to the reality of speech, description and the written word. He begins to put paint on canvas hoping that those who stand before the painting will wait and discover that McCallum's universe has moved into their own, and will not ask: "What does it mean?" And in the beauty of the silence of looking, will ask nothing at all, given that the viewer knows that feelings are a separate expression to that of words.
Once the unfortunate hostility to abstract form has subsided, as could possibly be the case with McCallum's art, another world of interior atmospheres awaits the patient viewer. Abstraction's emotional communication can be compared to gardening.
A rose garden - a place of color, arrangement of form and texture, together with daylight - is a work of art, perhaps the most eloquent and ephemeral of sculptural invention known. To ask a gardener of such creation: "What does it mean?" - Aside from being a visual non sequitur - raises questions about the sensitivity of the person asking the question about nature.
I suggest you enter McCallum's paintings with that point of view. Allow color, arrangement of form and texture, and modulations of light to give meaning to you before you search for words to describe what you are feeling. And just for a minute find a wordless personal connection to the painting, some reciprocal pull on the soul in the silence of observing.
KEVIN COSTELLO, Sarasota Calendar of the Arts