The Cohasset Paintings of David McCosh Summer 2000
“ALWAYS REMEMBER this moment,” he said to his
beautiful, frightful beach. He had only himself to
young son seconds before the opening kick-off, with
teach at Cohasset, and it transformed his art.
100,000 people roaring all around them, “Because
These paintings make me wish that McCosh
right now anything is possible.” That’s how I feel
never left Cohasset, never went to Cornwall, France,
about this group of paintings.
Mexico, Spain, even that he never went back to
David McCosh was forty-six in 1949. The talented
teaching. There’s no question that he was a gifted
young academic had been teaching for fifteen years at
teacher who developed a memorable style, but for me,
the University of Oregon, and he was into middle age.
he seldom matched the straight-ahead power and the
Happy, satisfied, contented? No—far from it. Frustrated,
deep meaning of the Cohasset paintings. The force,
depressed, concerned that his teaching was consuming
the intensity of this work rivals the Abstract Expres-
his art is probably closer to the truth. He could do
sionist paintings that were being made in New York
anything he wanted with a paintbrush, but his art had
at the same time. There are beautiful, original real-
become stale. His paintings were accomplished, but life-
izations of the strange things McCosh saw out on the
less. He worried that he had lost his ability to see things
sand and of the tide that left them behind. We see
as fresh and new. He needed to find a place where he
rich, sensuous places exactly like his beach on a foggy
could do that again. A place that he could discover.
morning. This is painting that flows naturally, inevi-
He had that opportunity with his first sabbatical
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tably, and directly from observation.
leave from the University in 1949. He and his wife,
Cohasset was to be McCosh’s epiphany. Why then
Anne, went to the beach at Cohasset, Washington, for
and there? Getting away from teaching must have
the fall months. It was “a wild, primitive place,” she
been a large part of it—in spite of his great gifts, and
told me years later, “with all kinds of strange things
perhaps because of them, teaching was consuming
left behind on the sand when the tide went out. It
much of his creativity. But equally important had
was unlike anything we knew. David felt like he had
to have been his discovery of a great primal force of
to start all over again to paint there.”
our region: the Pacific Ocean. He had seen the ocean
And start over he did. He painted in a manner that
before, but he didn’t discover it until he began to
matched the primitivism of the place, using pigment
paint what he saw there. The excitement, the drama,
directly out of the tube, palette knife, sticks, twigs
the joy of that discovery are in these paintings, as
from the beach, pushing, pulling the paint, forgetting
fresh as the day he made them, waiting to be shared.
the conventions he taught, the refinements he had
We should all have our Cohassets. These paintings,
learned. He painted exactly what he saw, as directly
with work from the rest of his life on the walls around
and simply as he could. He wanted nothing to stand
them, show us what Cohasset means. It is a time when
between the viewer and his experience of this raw,
anything is possible.
