Painting on the Edge

Art Business News, May, 2001 by Amy Leibrock

It's been a long journey for Texas artist Rod McGehee, whose distorted, lyrical landscapes pulsate with vivid color

Looking at Rod McGehee's vivid, playful renderings of technicolor landscapes and curvaceous buildings, you'd never guess he once made a living painting photorealistic Western art. But after half a lifetime of cross-country artistic journeys, this 47-year-old Texas artist has finally found his voice.

"Realistic painting was not fun. It's a technical process, not an emotional process," said McGehee. "Real art is interpretation, not copied. It took me a while to figure that out."

Now, instead of a precise replica of a beautiful place, he paints a looser version that bears the stamp of an artist's vision. Reminiscent of Matisse, Van Gogh or Gauguin, each of McGehee's paintings is like looking at a familiar scene through a psychedelic prism. Today, if he paints a cow or a horse, it's likely to be purple or blue.

"When my painting goes in a house, it changes the whole feel of the room," said McGehee. "It blows people across the room." Since dedicating himself full time to his art only three years ago, McGehee's paintings have been blowing plenty of collectors away. His first show at Art Inc. in San Antonio sold out, and he sold 25 originals during his most recent show there last winter.

"The response to Rod's work has been a phenomenon unmatched in our 34 years of being art dealers," said Art Inc.'s Cathie Clark. "He's our gallery's top-selling artist."

His painting "San Antonio Serenade," an ultra-bright depiction of San Antonio, was chosen from 30 submissions for the cover of the April issue of the inflight magazine America West. And his work is also being published through New Era Publishing as giclees, which he enhances. "When I start painting my giclees, sometimes I get a little carried away," said McGehee. "Sometimes I make changes from the original. Every giclee that I lay a brush on is different."

Art and painting have been a part of McGehee's life since he started drawing cars in fourth grade. "When most kids were out playing sports, I was drawing. It was just something that was in me," said McGehee, who moved throughout the West--Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma and Missouri--as a kid.

McGehee never intended to make a career with his art, even though he earned an art degree from Tarkio College in Missouri. He instead went into advertising sales and marketing which took him even more places--Iowa, Texas, Rhode Island and Tennessee.

"Keep in mind that I was always painting all this time--doing paintings just to paint, just because I want to," McGehee said from his studio in Marble Falls, Texas. He interrupted his advertising career every few years with stints playing in a rock-and-roll band, working in Texas oil field and painting realistic Western art for a Texas gallery owner.

"I had to learn realism before I could move on artistically," he said. "I painted realistically until there wasn't anywhere left to go. There wasn't any `me' in those paintings."

It was about this time that he was really struck by the color and simplicity of Matisse and other Fauve artists. After years of painting from a palette of low-key earth tones, he began experimenting with wild colors and loosening up his style, which proved to be rather challenging.

"It's really harder to simplify and paint stuff that's not quite there as opposed to copying everything you see," said McGehee. Watching his daughter paint when she was five years old helped push him in the right direction. "Kids have this beautiful, naive, innocent style of painting before the world messes them up, and that's what I'm trying to do. I like to work at that point where you're at the edge, where you're almost abstract but not quite."

The transition from realism to his current expressionistic look was a 10-year process full of paintings that he calls "failures." But once he honed in on his style and made the decision to become a full-time artist, he produced a painting a day for a year to build up a body of work in order to get into galleries. And it worked. "All along I was supposed to be painting," he said. "My work didn't start selling until I painted for myself," he said.

With his fast, loose style and love of landscapes, it makes sense that many of McGehee's paintings happen en plein air. "Sometimes I've come out with just great pieces outdoors in about 4 hours," he said. "When you go a 100 miles an hour like that you end up with spontaneous, fresh stuff that you can't get in a studio, because in the studio you tend to labor over stuff, and it comes out more sterile."

In addition to being inspired to paint the scenes of the Southwest, McGehee is drawn to the color and light of southern Europe--he's painted in Spain and France and hopes to go to Italy next. "Travel reinspires and rejuvenates me," he said.

Perhaps it's his transient spirit that keeps his on the road of reinvention. "I think great artists are constantly changing. I've just got to keep challenging myself."