“Wonderment at the world is art’s perennial subject. Artists are always waking us up, not just to material phenomena themselves but to our own awareness of them. Representational art acts as a kind of lens, refracting the observable and allowing us to see it with a measure of the artist’s own vision.”

— “How Comfortable it will be to touch the Earth”: Claire McConaughy at the Painting Center by John Mendelsohn, Artcritical Nov 2019

In the works of “Velvet Woods” there is nature, the observation of nature, a genuine connection, and transformation into a deeply human reflection. Like 19th century American landscape painting, McConaughy’s works have a direct honest approach to marveling at what is seen, but unlike that historical precedent she loosely brushes graphite with expressive lines, drips and dabs that pour out of the gesture of her brush onto the surface. She chooses to not replicate the scene precisely, but instead to interpret and transform the woods into dreamy visages. Using a combination of painted passages and fluidly drawn lines, her process creates layered imagery of interlaced trees, branches and visions of woods. The layers and light in her paintings create spatial tensions and surprising metaphors. These works continue in the lineage of landscape painting, and also come from McConaughy’s early experiences in southwestern Pennsylvania and life in New York City.

Claire McConaughy is a painter who lives and works in New York. She earned her MFA in painting from Columbia University and BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She has exhibited widely throughout her career in New York galleries and alternative spaces. Her works are included in corporate and private collections. For over a decade McConaughy was on the staff of New Observations Magazine, a non-profit art journal and is currently a professor of art.

Seeing – is something that many people take for granted. It is a powerful phenomenon in experiencing the world/life we live in day to day. The Space we occupy and move through – is 3-Dimensional. In outer space, all positive matter forms into a sphere with its own center of Gravity. We live upon such a sphere…the Earth. It is not Flat.

I think of my head as being a Gravitational center. From this center, I look at the World around me, and have found that – if I measure everything, it fits the skin of a sphere…perfectly. Out of a desire to have ALL of visible space in my paintings, floor/nadir, ceiling/zenith, and 360 degrees in all directions, I began painting the world around me on spherical surfaces.

I have experimented with other forms of representing this visual sphere, such as cutting it open and laying it flat – as Mercator did projecting his map of the Earth – seeking the least amount of distortion.

The form of my 3-Dimensional paintings is based upon various processes of visual perception. If I look at it this way, what will I find. These ways of looking and seeing are all related to the cutting-up of the sphere/visual field. I look at space, pull it apart, and put it back together, in many different ways. Thoughts and ideas via words, texts and drawing have also become prominent in my work, alongside painting. I try to never make the same painting twice. I always try to look at it in a different way.

Moving THROUGH this space has created other forms – like strips of space, which have jumped off the wall. This pseudo-scientific approach manifests the ”optical unconscious” into Poetic Visual Art.

Jackie Lima

January 2020