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Craig McPherson at Forum
Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Gerard McCarthy
In this recent exhibition, "Steel/ Stage," Craig McPherson presented two distinct bodies of work. The seemingly incongruous grouping featured images of steel mills in wintry landscapes hung beside interior views of theater stages, some empty, some populated with naked performers. The Kansas-born New York artist, who has been showing his refined figurative paintings since the early 1980s, included here 25 oils and pastel-on-canvas pieces ranging in height from 13 inches to over 6 feet.
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A large oil painting, Clairton Works (River), 2003-05, is an aerial view of one of the few surviving steel plants in the Pittsburgh area--mills that were key to the industrial engine of the U.S. economy in the last century. Two chimneys, partially obscured by steam, extend from the painting's top edge down toward the diagonal thrust of two covered conduits. These in turn lead the eye to the central horizontal line of a walled buttress along the bank of a murky river. On the near side of the waterway, two huge snow-covered mounds dwarf a tractor. The picture suggests the grim relationship between industrial production and natural forces, evoked here by the successive transformation of water from the icy snowdrifts to the liquid river, ending in the gaseous steam spewing from the factory.
In an expansive pastel on linen, Edgar Thomson (Night), 2001, McPherson has brilliantly rendered in black and gray sfumato a scenic view of the light-and-steam show produced by a gigantic steel plant at night. The kind of ethereal, misty illumination that appears in this work is a unifying element in the entire exhibition, since it recurs in several of the "Stage" paintings. These pieces depict dark shadowy spaces cut by vertical passages of warm, smoky glare revealing backstage equipment or showing the stark reflections of spotlights on empty stages.
In Rehearsal (2001-05), crisply defined hemp ropes form a vertical barrier that partly occludes a seated male figure on the far left holding his red-gloved hands over his ears. Beside him to the right, a nude woman smoking a cigarette languidly watches another cavorting overhead on a flying trapeze. The latter is caught in a triangular configuration of hazy spotlight beams. The mood of Act One: Scene One (1999) is a bit more sinister. A red wall nearly absorbs a female figure in the distance who holds a whip. She faces a naked woman in the foreground who stands beside a spotlit, seated man, dressed in suit and trilby; he stares out at the audience with vacant menace.
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