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Barbara McCann......Artist Profile
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Barbara McCann was born and raised in western Pennsylvania, in the rural environs of Newcastle. She began her artistic endeavors with drawing as a child, and then with painting in her teenage years. Upon graduating from high school, she took a four-year apprenticeship in architectural illustration and design, which set the stage for a career in commercial art. McCann moved to Florida in 1973, and for the next 20 years ran her own architectural illustration studio.
McCann's career and interests in commercial and fine art dovetailed. While maintaining her business, McCann explored a variety of mediums and methodologies for landscape and portrait painting. In the early to late seventies, she studied oils with acclaimed figure painter Marilyn Bendell. While under Bendell's tutelage, McCann discovered the works of Nicola Simbari, an Italian artist whose vision and style has been an enduring inspiration for her. |
Morning Light, serigrah |
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In the late seventies, McCann worked to develop a more fluid, translucent presentation in her art. At Bendell's suggestion, she took up watercolors, studying with renowned artists Valfred Thelin and Charles Reid. She melded her fine art talents with her commercial work by painting architectural renderings in watercolors, which caused a sensation among her clients. In the mid-eighties, McCann returned to oils as the primary medium for her noncommercial art, utilizing watercolors solely for sketches of landscapes and people.
McCann's skills in art and architectural illustration led to a decade-long relationship as an instructor with the Ringling College of Art & Design. From 1983 to 1993, she taught classes in perspective drawing and illustration at the Florida college, which is rated as one of the finest art schools in the United States. She developed an approach to the intrinsically difficult study of perspective that made it comprehensible and useful to even novice artists. She is considering outlining her methods in a book. Over the course of her career, McCann steadily expanded both her commercial and fine art clienteles. The interest in her paintings led her to establish a gallery in Sarasota, Florida, and in the early nineties she signed with a large publisher and gallery chain in the United States. Then in 1995, she secured representation with Fingerhut Group Publishers and is currently self-publishing. Barbara McCann continues to work and live in Florida. She finds aesthetic inspiration both near and far -- from the sunny climate of her home to locales she has visited in her extensive travels over the past 20 years: the Caribbean, the West Indies, Central America, Greece, and Europe.
The Art of Barbara McCann "I am obsessed with light and shadow," observes artist Barbara McCann, whose lush, sensuous images are testaments to these visual preoccupations. The people and places McCann depicts are studies in brilliance, shadow, and kaleidoscopic color. Her love of landscape, architecture, and figure painting, use of the palette knife, and her impressionistic treatment of subjects are important features of her style. Landscape painting has a long and venerated history. Prior to the advent of photography, the only access people had to enjoying distant panoramas was either to travel to the locales or to view paintings created by artists who had been there. The images offered a wealth of vistas -- from the sublime to the exotic. Barbara McCann's landscapes and seascapes feature sights that exude a sense of warmth and vibrancy. Sky and water are jewel tones of sapphire and turquoise; stuccoed buildings are blazing white with blood red roofs; foliage is a riot of lush greens and mingled hues of red, pink, and amber. Shadows are knife-edged, their ebony denseness soft and velvety. Everything -- the sailboats, the buildings, the land, and the people &endash; is illuminated by strong, clear light. The brightness of the sunlight, which is in evidence in McCann's interior scenes as well as her exterior scenes, hints at specific geographic locales, especially the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. McCann notes that the vision she commits to canvas is not an actual record of a particular site. This is her personal departure from traditional landscape painting, for painters often recreate a moment they are witness to. Instead, McCann finds that fragments and details of places come together, and the finished work is an intimation of, rather than a statement about, a scene. Similarly, Barbara McCann is not a portrait painter, though she is an outstanding figure painter. The people who appear in her works are realistic in dimension, color, dress, and attitude. On a city street, men and women stroll or hurry along, in the dazzling sun of a warm day. Near a beach, a woman ascends the stairs, holding her hat against a stray breeze. In a room, a pensive lady reclines, lost in thought. McCann's men and women are immediately identifiable, and yet are merely hinted at. They exude a sense of vitality and movement within the scene. McCann's use of the palette knife adds a textural level to her images, which contributes to the overall impression of liveliness. In some ways, she doesn't paint so much as sculpt a scene. Her heavy impasto technique imbues objects and figures with an air of solidity and dimension. The palette knife is well-suited to her style, which is reminiscent of impressionism. Impressionists changed the tenor of representational work by concentrating on the feelings a scene evoked rather than striving to accurately reproduce the actual elements of the scene. While a tree, building, or vase of flowers essentially was still recognizable, the impressionists would utilize color and light to transform an object, scene, or person into something that was suggested rather than portrayed realistically. Barbara McCann's love of light, use of a rich, saturated color palette, and heavily textured impasto technique mark her as an heir to the impressionists' ideals. Her belief that a painting is not a faithful recreation of a place or thing, but rather a distillation of a mood or ambiance she associates with a scene or object, further establishes her link to impressionism. When questioned, McCann cites both abstract and impressionist artists as influences. Among her favorites are Andre Derain, John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Richard Diebenkorn, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Nicola Simbari. Light, shadow, color, texture -- these are the fundamental elements of Barbara McCann's art. Her expertise in architectural rendering, keen eye for perspective, affection for landscape and figure painting, comprehensive understanding of the malleable nature of oils, and appreciation for the beauty in the world, both natural and manmade, all enrich the images McCann commits to canvas and paper. She creates visions of warmth and wonder, full of life and light. |
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