Robert McCauley was born and raised in Mt. Vernon, Washington. He graduated from Western Washington University in 1969, and received his Master of Fine Arts Degree from Washington State University in 1972. Throughout his career, McCauley has earned many prestigious awards including a Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 and the Illinois Arts Council in 1999. McCauley also enjoyed a long and distinguished career as professor and Chairman of the Art Department at Rockford College in Illinois. Robert McCauley has created a mode of realism that is haunting and full of ambiguity. His distinctive animals manage to seem literal and symbolic at the same time, the viewer is suspended between these realms.
Robert McCauley is an important 21st century American artist, and history will remember him as such. But in order to understand why, we first must consider where he is from and how he got here.
A little less than a decade ago, McCauley was featured at a major exhibition in Chicago and he was quoted as saying then, "I think you spend all your life trying to find the right form for the content you have within you." Urban, Midwestern visitors who viewed the show were enthralled.
Make no mistake about the source of McCauley's inner content: He is a product of America's greatest forest-the mighty aboriginal stands of fir, spruce, cedar and redwoods growing in the Pacific Northwest. Those skyscraping canopies once reservoired a breathtaking array of ecological richness and diversity, from streams choked with spawning salmon to massive grizzliesl wapiti and deer haunting the understories, raptors screeching through the misty, arboreal heavens, and the loom of an ever-present ocean.
As the totem poles and amulets of native peoples attest, the life forces of nature there are planted indelibly into the human psyche. Robert McCauley's too.
When I think of where McCauley fits into American art, as a contemporary painter, sculptor and naturalistic interpreter, I place him in the same philosophical tribe as Walton Ford, Alexis Rockman, Annie Coe, Ray Troll, and a group of Rocky Mountain regionalists who include Monte Dolack, Parks Reece and Tina Close. It's heady company (all have seen their ecologically-oriented work become acquired for various museum collections) and, in the case of Ford, he's internationally famous as an iconoclast.
As a group, their overlay of modern environmental commentary is bold, courageous and inescapable in how it speaks to us-in our time. Individually, per artist, it is also distinct. Why is McCauley's oeuvre so deceivingly potent Because it oozes with authenticity, emanating from his home in the West.
Born in 1946 in Mt. Vernon, Washington, McCauley is the son and grandson of loggers. With the rise of industrial forestry, he watched the sheltering groves of his youth being relentlessly felled. There is, he says, nothing more traumatically disquieting than walking through a landscape after it has been clearcut.
Nobel Prize winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) resorted to illusion, metaphor and magical realism to tell true stories about events where the real names of protagonists could not be used. For McCauley and his pack of artists, animals are anthropomorphic muses for their own magical realism, portrayed with clever satire to make the narrative more palpable.
As he notes in his accompanying essay in this catalog: "As a human exercising what little political power I have, I struggle to campaign for nature and to remind all humans of our responsibilities as stewards of this planet." He refuses to become cynical or absorbed in despair. Rather, he uses his enormous talent to inspire and be a voice for the voiceless.
Of greatest delight to McCauley is the collision of juxtaposition- between real and surreal, humankind and nature, light and shadow, representation and abstraction, bright palette and subtle, the Romantics like Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt versus Willem de Koonig and Jackson Pollock, and visual language supplemented occasionally by the written word. It's art for a thinking person.
McCauley draws upon classical literature, political philosophy, natural history and, of course, the temporal movements of art to inform his message. (For 35 years, he was a popular college art instructor in Illinois before returning to Washington State). Always, there are deeper layers to be explored for those with the inclination and wherewithal to dive in deeper.
McCauley's bestiary in this exhibition "Why They Like The West" with sculptor Kirsten Kainz at Visions West epitomizes the point. By design, his animals are voyeuristically joining us in our living space, but the question really is: In this mirror between the frame, is it nature or humanity itself that is meeting our own gaze?
As paintings alone, the works are soothing, evocative, inviting and whimsically almost interactive. Were one, for example, to position a McCauley above the fireplace mantle, it would seem perfectly in place. And yet, for the art collector who enjoys the prospect of visual media serving as catalysts for conversation with guests or family members, including youngsters, the invitation looms large.
Indeed it is in this realm where Robert McCauley earns a place as more than an artist simply knocking off pretty scenes. His objective is not to anesthetize, but to awaken the power of wildlife symbolism in the personal and collective unconscious.
While critics can argue about what the role of art is, one persuasive notion is that it should heighten the experience of being ambulatory and therefore make us more aware, more informed, and more sensitive to the world around us.
McCauley's intention, certainly, is not to preach about that which compels him to paint-the desecration of a natural firmament that makes Earth glorious and novel; he is, instead, simply asking us to, if even for a moment, slow down, stop, and idyll in the muse that is wild life.
Sometimes I feel as if I'm a class photographer at an elementary school, trying to get a host of subjects to be still while I fit them all in the viewfinder.
As a painter, the task is equally difficult to arrange my images within the rectangle, trying to avoid an obvious composition, but rather, to compose in the manner in which nature composes. Which is to say no composition. It simply is.
As a human exercising what little political power I might have, I struggle to campaign for nature and to remind all humans of our responsibilities as stewards of this planet. Art being transcendent, the images must rise above the banal, the vulgar, and the horrific. Graphic depiction of the plight of wildlife is an experience with which we are all too familiar. We turn away when news reports of abused animals flash on the screen. Instead, I choose to present a moment that does not immediately conjure a doomed future, but rather a moment when nature is in limbo, with a future still to be determined. It's a somewhat playful and ethereal moment, ironically rooted in the physical, malleable act of painting. Without that joyful element chock full o' oil paint and brush invention, I'd have to find a different form for my voice. To paint every day is pure optimism. As Marshall Mcluhan's mantra tells us, "the medium is the message".
I am a fictionalized history revisionist. I gather together my animals and compress them into the rectangle as if they're all on the Raft of the Medusa, adrift, with one common concern: survival. As would happen on any lifeboat, the inhabitants are a mixed lot indeed. Animals from different climate zones are found side by side. Not so fictitious now that global warming is blurring the distinct zones. Predator and prey ignore previous tensions and stare out at the viewer, as if to ask, "Well?" And a storm brews on the horizon. Read the signs. We are down at eye level with the animals because there is no hierarchy. Snails and polar bears. We're all in this together. Read the signs.
In many of the paintings, I have used an overlay of the painted word. I've painted them not solid, but as outlines as if a narrator's voice has been dubbed over the image. Wordsmithing and painting are of equal delight. If words are painted in paint, are they words or paintings? I trust the word "bear" as I trust the image of "bear". This is my voice.