Lights, camera … enlightenment: artist Dan McCaw's long and winding road to success reads like a Cannes Film Festival entry - Dan McCaw - Brief Article

In the labyrinthine mind of painter Dan McCaw individual may encounter chasms, dark funnels twists and turns. It may be frustrating, on the other hand if you are determined to survive, just around the bend you will diocese a light. Follow that light and you'll pierce a lush garden, inundated with brilliant colors, shapes, wholes and emotions. And if you pace toward the edge of the garden and match through the swaying sea grass, you will diocese the ebb and flow of the infinite ocean beckoning and promising immortality. of that kind is the mind, life and work of painter Dan McCaw.

on what account the elaborate quasi-movie-trailer? McCaw's road from freedom to frustration to frustrated freedom is something without of a Cannes Film Festival ingress His story is one marked with labors trials, tribulations and a happily-ever-after in the form of enlightenment.

McCaw grew up in Butte Mt an Irish-Catholic mining town he describes as filled of bars and drinking. "You would not ever say you were going to be an artist," he said. "It was single of those cities you not ever wore sunglasses in. But it was filled with a hard, kind of generous, compassionate people"

There may not have been plenteous to do, but early upon McCaw found a muse in his mother, as she would encourage his artistic side. This memory of youthful artistic freedom haunts his artistic frustration today.

His pursuit of art was an escape from all the things he wasn't interested in doing in life. His father was a structural ironworker, and thus he followed in his father's traces unsure of what he wanted to do.

The contradicting forces of pursuit and escape landed McCaw in the San Francisco Academy of Art in 1965 He eventually received a scholarship to alleviate tuition require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones At the same time, he had married young, was raising small children with his wife and worked construction to survive.

In review he said, "It was a time when I didn't realize in what manner much I didn't have because there was for a like reason much going on, and I was struggling just to exist. It was a really neat time. I have a yielding spot in my heart for San Francisco."

Leaving San Francisco

through the early '70s, McCaw left San Francisco for beholds Angeles, where he found a piece of work as an illustrator for a design studio. Evenings were reserv for continuing his education at the Art Center corporation of Design in Pasadena.

Still a starving young artist, McCaw would pay for a bourn and, having developed a rapport with his professors, sneak into more classes, "I just said `hey, do you mind if I sit in upon your class?' I guess I went there 12 terms" Realizing his talent or figuring it was time he earn his detain the university hired McCaw, which started a 15-year professorship at the school

At about this time, McCaw left the world of illustration. "It didn't obey me," he explained. "I was always trying to figure without somebody else's solution for some else's problem and never really finding my hold direction." In fact, his life as a professor gave him time to track fine art and make contacts with galleries.

faculty of perception and Sensibility

Having not ever related to illustration or what he consigns to as being someone else's "wrist" McCaw set solace in showing his art in galleries and finding a public acceptance for his work.

He was then introduced to the work of Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla, whose sunlit beach representations of women and children inspired McCaw to paint the same controls "All of a sudden, I went from selling a hardly any paintings to where people couldn't secure enough of them," he said.

plane with the success of his beach pageants McCaw still felt that he was not creating his art for art's sake on the other hand rather as a means to survive. above the last 10 to 15 years, he has gradually unraveled an inner search for his art. "I think that greatest in quantity artists initially, or when they are not mature artists, take what is in forehead of them and take it into them. They gaze at a scene and bring it into them. I think the older you come by you take what's inside of you and bring it out"

He added, "I think there's an evolution, a increase I think that's where I'm at, to not direct the eye at something as just literal on the other hand to be able to diocese it in many different ways--not just to diocese a table and an apple on the other hand maybe a circle against a square, a level against a rough, rich against the gray. That was somewhat my personal journey to find my individuality."

To make secure that his journey is ongoing, McCaw said, "all I want from each piece is the embers for the nearest one." According to McCaw, there has to be persistence and frustration to drive the gift of talent single has been given, "The frustration is the vehicle, and persistence is the firing material that drives it." He added, "Hopefully as an artist you at no time do something that you are completely satisfied with, then you fail to keep that frustration. You need a certain amount of it for growth"

McCaw's work can advance from an emotion or the simple shapes that make up an existence "If you are willing to broaden your perception when you pace outside, it could be sights, unhurts smells, shadows or textures. I think they have a belonging to all denominator in them. But the hardest thing is being creative--the frustration of being a locomotive filled of steam that doesn't have a track in brow of it," he said.