Octopus
Painting
Year: 2020
Edition: Unique
Technique: Oil and graphite on canvas
Framed: No
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AUTHENTICITY
All artworks on IdeelArt are original, signed, delivered directly from the artist's studio, and come with a certificate of authenticity.McCagg's work is informed and influenced by formal elements such as line and space, which provide an underlying aesthetic vocabulary for her compositions.
Xanda McCagg is an American abstract artist who lives and works in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.
A classically trained painter, she has evolved into a style that abandons figuration in search of evoking the human essence.
McCagg creates her abstract compositions using a mixture of oil, graphite and collage. Although she began her practice as a figurative painter, she has abandoned the figure in search of more intimate portrayals of the human essence. Nonetheless, her work is informed and influenced by formal elements such as line and space, which provide an underlying aesthetic vocabulary for her compositions.
Integral to her process is an exploration of the small and large ways relationships can “shift.” Through the expressive layering of thin and impasto color, and delicate and rough-hewn lines, McCagg works to articulate these often-subtle evolutions. Rather than planning precisely where her composition will lead her, she intuits throughout her process the minimum amount needed to manifest the essence of what she calls “the fine line between perception and imagination of these relationships.”
Xanda McCagg is an American abstract artist who lives and works in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. A classically trained painter, she has evolved into a style that abandons figuration in search of evoking the human essence.
Education
McCagg earned her BFA in Art Education from Boston University. She has also studied at the New York Studio School and the Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, ME, and taught at the New School in New York and at the Bronx Museum. She has completed several fellowship and residencies, including at the Vermont Studio Center, The American Academy in Rome, Italy, The Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams MA, and at C.A.M.A.C in Marnay Sur Seine, France.
Technique
McCagg weaves traces of experience together into paintings that edge between abstraction and a suggestion of figuration. The resulting dialogue between form and content, shape and vivid color is an ever-evolving conversation.
In her recent work, McCagg has drawn from impressions from traveling and from art history, looming back as a way of making sense of the present. Beginning with a cross, she masks it onto the canvas as an understructure upon which to build. Gradually veils of paint cover and alter the vertical and horizontal lines, allowing the cross to take on a new meaning. Working with the notion of “Icon” as an iteration of her focus on relationships, McCagg assembles small, large, and pieced-together canvases as visual wholes that echo in the manner of icons or totems as metaphors.
Inspiration
Xanda McCagg’s paintings push and pull our perception through layers of distilled human experience. Using the language of line, color, and mark making, McCagg’s work comments on the dichotomies that shape our lives on both an intimate and global level. Observing the world around her, exploring the cause and effect of shifting relationships as they occur in nature and in humanity, McCagg creates compositions that speak to memory, metaphor, and perception....
Embodied in these paintings is the deep human need for hope so pronounced in these times. Connecting to the universality of art that communicates through the centuries, from one hand, to an eye, to the brain and back out, interpreted by each individual - that is the depth of understanding.
Collections
The work is well represented in private and corporate collections, such as Alliance Capital Management, New York, Posternak Blankstein & Lund LLP, Boston and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York and The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London Connecticut.
Exhibitions
Xanda McCagg has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as in Budapest, Hungary and Paris, France.
Galleries
Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence RI
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