Artist Statements — Terry McKelvey

Statements on painting and studio practice

For the past five years I’ve been painting still lifes and studio scenes from direct observation. In each scenario I look for something visually challenging to paint and impose some formal or technical parameter to work within. What happens if I combine these colors, or arrange my palette with this grouping of pigments? What if this object touches the edge of the picture plane? How can I effectively depict this surface or fabric? On a conceptual level, is it possible to imbue the image with a semblance of meaning? Some of the forms I paint have personal significance while other objects are chosen for purely formal reasons, or for the technical challenge of painting them.

In each painting I attempt to create an unromanticized yet compelling arrangement that doesn’t feel traditional and staid, which is how I assume most people consider the genre of still life, if they consider the genre at all. In most cases I try to avoid harmonious or familiar color arrangements to, instead, find color combinations that are intentionally discomforting. By using quirky objects as subject matter, or by combining them with more traditional objects, I seek to create scenarios and images that feel somewhat unsettled. In many cases, the manner in which I arrange and frame the forms is intended to create spatial and compositional tension. I suspect that, despite my stated intentions, my love of paint makes it difficult for me not to aestheticize the paintings through the depiction of light or displays of proficiency, and that this makes them less dissonant than what I had hoped for.

Still life is a genre that I’ve strayed from and returned to multiple times during my four-plus decades of painting. I’ve always felt somewhat conflicted about painting this subject due to its (possibly undeserved) bourgeois connotations. The fact is, depicting light and forms in a manipulated space has been a lifelong concern that connects this body of work to my other on-again off-again genre of choice, figurative narratives. Just as my figure-based images might offer a direct insight into my world view, my hope is that the manner in which I depict objects on a tabletop could also, perhaps less directly, communicate something about how I see the world. My most fundamental purpose, however, is that these paintings offer enough complexity for engaged contemplation, and that the formal aspects of the images hold up and keep revealing themselves under repeated scrutiny.

- December 2024

My paintings are created primarily in oil paint and my drawings in charcoal and graphite. They are largely informed by the direct observation of my subjects and surroundings, although I additionally create narrative images that combine aspects of direct observation with memory and imagined scenarios.

While my images are representational, I am not primarily concerned with the attainment of realism as a goal in itself. I consider myself a formalist in artistic temperament, and I am primarily interested in perceptual issues. Among these are the subtle and constantly changing relationships among colors. I am fascinated by the manner in which composition, color, and paint application combine to affect the manner in which form, volume, light, and space are depicted within the picture plane. The degree to which individual works appear realistic, expressionistic, or abstracted varies, depending on my response to the forms I observe, and what I am trying to convey. I attempt to capture the dynamic tensions or contradictions in spaces and forms, which largely reflects the manner in which I perceive and experience my visual surroundings.

In my figurative paintings and, to a lesser degree, in the still lifes I arrange, I attempt to infuse the image with some existential question or conundrum. However, I prefer the suggestion of content to something more obvious or literal. It’s difficult for artists to strike an effective balance, so that pictorial content (symbolic, metaphoric, or narrative) is neither obvious or (worse, even) convoluted and esoteric. In any case, I typically find that enigmatic images have a greater capacity to feel compelling and universal, and I seek that quality in the images I construct.

- August, 2015

My painting process is something of a confessional act. I use painting to examine things that scare me, or situations whose solution eludes me. To intellectualize this process as an explanation for why I paint my particular subjects is possibly disingenuous, and suggests a level of lucidity that may be over-appraised. However, a certain amount of emotional distancing is necessary for me to face the images as they emerge and are realized on canvas, some of it requiring rational thought. I occasionally question just how rational or good this distance is for my work, but it's how I get the paintings done. Love and relationships, and my ambivalence about them, are the impetus behind many of these metaphoric narratives.

Give and Take, oil on canvas, 64x48”, 2000 — *Give and Take*, oil on canvas, 64x48”, 2000

Most of the paintings have a sordid, ‘dirty laundry’ sensibility about them. This aesthetic has a perverse appeal for me, and provides a formal and creative challenge. I'm interested in the problem of presenting an uncomfortable situation or disorder so that it retains its unsavory character, yet compels viewers to look and identify with it on some personal level.

The more recent paintings, completed during the last two to three years, are a further search for balance between formal and pictorial concerns that has driven my work for a long time. Compared to earlier paintings, where I indulged my interest in deconstructing form and space with a different regard for the narrative, my recent approach to form has become more restrained or controlled. For a painter, meaning is achieved or modified as much- if not more- by the manner in which color, paint, space and form are manipulated as the subject that is presented. I currently equate the role of the formal elements in a painting to that of a piano accompanist in a vocal recital: to provide a sympathetic platform for the soloist. The narrative may get more attention as the so-called subject of the painting, but the manner in which the narrative has been presented ultimately determines the integrity or character of the work.

I want the formal aspects of these works to be demanding and accomplished, but not conspicuous. In essence, I want form to create an atmosphere that allows the viewer to enter, consider, and search for meaning in the narrative.

- February, 2004