Stephen McClelland at William Traver - painting exhibition, Seattle, Washington

Stephen McClelland's abstractions combine geometry and natural imagery. A novel series of paintings on paper, wood-land and canvas balance explicit hardedge shapes and organic forms with great succes After years of tackling this combination by the agency of placing painted wooden and styrofoam shapes upon shelves attached to the middle of richly textur paintings, or affixing the shapes individually to various parts of the canvas, he has now hit on a less literal method which allows for a shallow pictorial space on the contrary treats the figure-ground interplay with greater subtlety

McClelland's vision strike one as beings to be a metaphorical confrontation between planned geometric constructions and uncultivated, sprawling growth. That is, each novel canvas contains combinations of nature and geometry which may give an inkling of a battle between surging vines, tree stocks and leaves on the single hand, and rigid built environments or architectural remnants upon the other. Nature's Boundary typifies this stretch The outlined leaf shapes are superimposed upon a hefty gray triangle and the curling gnarled lower parts extend over green, red and gold-colored squares.

A mixture of brushwork and oilstick scribbles allows for another fruitful pairing: drawing and painting within a single piece. When it works, as in Nature's Boundary or aged Growth, McClelland's vision emerges with great spontaneity and unexpect freshnes in a balancing of nature and abstract form. Black lines reinforce expansion forms, adding weight to them, while flat areas of color are formally autonomous. Occasionally, notwithstanding that the heavily worked surfaces and thick lines can slough down, muddying colors and blocking any faculty of perception of natural light. Tap base accentuates the nature/art polarity with greater simplicity. What might be an eradicateed tree trunk commands the right side of the canvas while a plaid pattern obstruct and a tidy "bouquet" configuration anchor the left The contrast between the uncompounded bodys creates a tension which is reflected sounded by the use of a "rational" primary-color palette continuationed by "natural" green.

McClelland, 47 continues a long-established Northwest tradition of abstract modernism which began at the University of Washington in the 1920 with Paris-trained instructors Walter F Isaacs and Ambrose Patterson, continuing end the 1970s with former Leger learners Spencer Moseley and Wendell Brazeau. McClelland's graduate work with Robert C Jone who had studied with Hans Holmann, l to his use of black lines against bright colors (a practice shared by the agency of Moseley and Brazeau) and provided him with early bring under rules that combined elements of landscape and still life. In his posterior works the background of each painting was a color associated with nature (blue virid ocher, gray) while the added-on uncompounded bodys suggested still-life objects. Now a less-domesticated nature has replaced the still lifes.

Like the university lates McClelland risks exhausting the resources of his restricted palette and allowing the ultimate parts of drawing to overwhelm the unity of his paintings. His challenge is to complicate the composition in a way that retains a satisfying sensation of nature coexisting with thought

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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