LINDA McCALL

ARTIST STATEMENT

Life has given me many opportunities to travel throughout the world. While many of my paintings relate to moments in time while travelling, they have come to include more personal and local surroundings with moments in my life today.

My style of painting draws, to a great extent, on the history of past figurative painters such as the paintings of early 20th C., American, Edward Hopper; and earlier painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin; or 17th C. Dutch painter, Johanne Vermeer, and Rembrandt; and then the Bay Area Figurative Painters of the 50s such as David Park. It was the Bay Area painters who sought to reincorporate figurative subject-matter into their work in defiance of the pure abstraction that was favored at the time by the “New York School”. Those painters were challenging the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. They continued to embrace the spirit of abstraction but chose to incorporate figures into their contemporary settings of the time. Similarly, my work has evolved moving from the representational work in my earlier years of formal art training; then moving into more non-objective expressive work; and settling, for now, somewhere in the middle.  My graduate school thesis addressed the challenge I pursue even now with the possibility of balancing abstraction and representation successfully. That challenge still fuels my interest and continues to evolve.

Regarding the content of my work, I was always intrigued with the sense of loneliness, of isolation, and mystery expressed in the images of 20th century painter Edward Hopper; also the mystique and use of lighting in 17th century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer; and with the simplified expressively painted forms of 20th century Bay Area painters who captured intimate moments. These artists thoughts on painting aligned in many ways with my personal sensibilities such as the challenge of trying to paint the feeling of the time of day, or the temperature; and to create a mood that would become a stage for ambiguous figures to tell my stories. I began to use the mystery and intrigue I have when walking through narrow streets of the Medieval cities of San Gimignano and Ravenna in Italy, or Eze, in southern France as well as everyday mundane locations. The challenge continues to use paint and imagery without becoming illustrative; to give enough representational information that one “might” be drawn into the painting but not tell all. I want an alluring space that hovers in the space between abstraction and representation that will engage the viewer in my stories of life and moments in time; things that are there one moment and become history the next. When I am most successful, the paintings are neither abstract nor realistic but in the end are both. The challenge continues, swinging back and forth like a pendulum as I try to capture human emotions expressed by their body language as they tell my stories of life in the 21st century.