The Cohasset Paintings of David McCosh University of Oregon Museum of Art, Summer 2000

The Cohasset Paintings of David McCosh

Summer 2000

“ALWAYS REMEMBER this moment,” he said to his young son seconds before the opening kick-off, with 100,000 people roaring all around them, “Because right now anything is possible.” That’s how I feel about this group of paintings.

David McCosh was forty-six in 1949. The talented young academic had been teaching for fifteen years at the University of Oregon, and he was into middle age. Happy, satisfied, contented? No—far from it. Frustrated, depressed, concerned that his teaching was consuming his art is probably closer to the truth. He could do anything he wanted with a paintbrush, but his art had become stale. His paintings were accomplished, but lifeless. He worried that he had lost his ability to see things as fresh and new. He needed to find a place where he could do that again. A place that he could discover.

He had that opportunity with his first sabbatical leave from the University in 1949. He and his wife, Anne, went to the beach at Cohasset, Washington, for the fall months. It was “a wild, primitive place,” she told me years later, “with all kinds of strange things left behind on the sand when the tide went out. It was unlike anything we knew. David felt like he had to start all over again to paint there.”

And start over he did. He painted in a manner that matched the primitivism of the place, using pigment directly out of the tube, palette knife, sticks, twigs from the beach, pushing, pulling the paint, forgetting the conventions he taught, the refinements he had learned. He painted exactly what he saw, as directly and simply as he could. He wanted nothing to stand between the viewer and his experience of this raw, beautiful, frightful beach. He had only himself to teach at Cohasset, and it transformed his art.

These paintings make me wish that McCosh never left Cohasset, never went to Cornwall, France, Mexico, Spain, even that he never went back to teaching. There’s no question that he was a gifted teacher who developed a memorable style, but for me, he seldom matched the straight-ahead power and the deep meaning of the Cohasset paintings. The force, the intensity of this work rivals the Abstract Expressionist paintings that were being made in New York at the same time. There are beautiful, original realizations of the strange things McCosh saw out on the sand and of the tide that left them behind. We see rich, sensuous places exactly like his beach on a foggy morning. This is painting that flows naturally, inevitably, and directly from observation.

Cohasset was to be McCosh’s epiphany. Why then and there? Getting away from teaching must have been a large part of it—in spite of his great gifts, and perhaps because of them, teaching was consuming much of his creativity. But equally important had to have been his discovery of a great primal force of our region: the Pacific Ocean. He had seen the ocean before, but he didn’t discover it until he began to paint what he saw there. The excitement, the drama, the joy of that discovery are in these paintings, as fresh as the day he made them, waiting to be shared.

We should all have our Cohassets. These paintings, with work from the rest of his life on the walls around them, show us what Cohasset means. It is a time when anything is possible.

After the Storm, Cohasset Beach, 1949 Watercolor on paper, 12 x 15 inches Private Collection

Beach, 1949 Gouache on paper, 11 x 15 inches Private Collection

Beach, 1949 Oil on canvas, 22 x 22 inches Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Purchased by the State of Oregon; 1970:10.2