Collaborations with My Subject August 2006
THIS SHOW ASKS THE QUESTION: how do we explain the
difference
between
a
highly
accomplished,
successful work of art (in other words, a really good painting) and a painting that is more than all of that—a painting that represents an artist’s finest work, a painting that can rightly be termed “great”? Let’s begin by recognizing that the terms “good” and “great” as applied to art carry heavy baggage. Some would say that these terms represent subjective judgments that are little more than expressions of individual preference or bias. Is David McCosh a greater painter than Carl Hall? Is he a greater artist than the sculptor Jan Zach? Is a great painting by McCosh as good as a great painting by Marsden Hartley? Or is a good painting by Hartley better than a great painting by McCosh? We’ll leave those meaty questions for another day.
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For present purposes, I’m using the terms “good” and
that McCosh was a highly skilled painter who had
“great” as a way of assessing the relative success of
mastered the fundamentals of pictorial structure,
McCosh’s various paintings, not as a way of ranking
color harmony, balance, tension, and the like. And
them against the output of any other artist (as enter-
that explains all the really good paintings he made.
taining as that might be).
But why are some of his paintings dramatically more
The question that gave rise to this show really
successful than others? What makes some works so
came from my study of McCosh’s large body of work,
vivid, so charged with energy that they practically
first with his wife, Anne, as my guide, as I prepared
leap off the wall? How do we explain them? And why
a retrospective of his work for the Maude Kerns Art
didn’t he just make great paintings every time out?
Center in 1988, and then in the last several years,
I don’t know that McCosh ever answered these ques-
as I worked on the series of shows this gallery has
tions. If we take him at his word, his paintings began
presented. McCosh did many good paintings. But
with his careful observation of his subject. He looked
what is really striking are the occasional pieces I
for what was unique and distinctive. He painted what
would find in the stacks, such as those in this show,
he saw in his subject that he found no where else. But
that are simply off the charts. There’s no question
there must be something more that explains how his
