Jim McVicker: A Way of Seeing

I want the landscape itself or the stove or the person to dictate the direction the paintings point to go I want up as you know it's possible but I want to approach it as open as I can so that I'm not coming there with preconceived ideas about how employment in something I want what I'm looking at to kind of talk to me which it does and then with whatever knowledge I have would ever experience I have whatever talent I may have whatever I can bring to it and that's what I bring to it you people in California call it the north coast probably the wildest rugged shoreline in the lower 48 states a sparsely inhabited raggedy clift 200 miles or so open ocean coast equally far from Portland Oregon in San Francisco California some people say it has fewer harbors and more rocks fewer people and bigger trees than anywhere else on earth it's foggy sometimes and in winter it rains a bit there's a lot of sunshine and long summer evenings in this amazing landscape lives the nationally renowned painter Jim McVicker with his wife Terry oats oats is also a highly regarded painter and they each have a studio that they built next to their house McVicar enjoys painting in the studio but his primary focus is painting the landscape so when the Sun shines you can bet he'll be on the road by seven o'clock looking for a place to paint he's the real deal he's up at dawn and you know it doesn't go in until the Sun Goes Down and the amount of time that he has put into an impassioned learning his craft he he really he's as good as it gets he's an amazing painter once McVicker finds a scene in a composition that excites him he sets up his French easel very quickly and in minutes he's starting to paint he starts the painting drawing very fast and accurate with thin red paint he likes a painting to have an underlying abstract design that he can build the whole painting over the top then he starts right in laying down color blocking in the painting with a large brush and thin paint working very fast not concerned with detail but he's thinking hard about valley in color right from the start all the colors in the scene are showing up on the canvas very early in the process even the brightest richest colors are present from the first minutes of blocking it in he looks at the scene every few seconds as he paints every minute or two he stands back and looks at the painting and the scene together he's thinking about the composition the colors and the light the angle of the Sun at this time of day the color of the air and HUD filters the light the lingering fog are the high clouds the air in the scene is a major subject of a McVicker painting he has spent so many hours watching and thinking about this North Coast atmosphere that he has developed a way of seeing it which is very unique I think that he does see things that other people don't see because he's been looking for such a long time that people pull off see me painting and wonder what when you see out there where you painting and then they look at the painting and then they look at the scene and it's like clicks I think that's what the artist does is is we we can we can take something out there that I think for most people is just a jumble visual you know assault that they maybe they aren't able to zero lean on the beauty of it after an hour and a half or two hours he stops working on this first painting and puts it away because by then the Sun has moved and the light has changed but he might take the painting out again the day after to continue working on it in the same light with a large painting he's been known to take it back out 10 or 20 times sometimes even waiting a year for the season to return he is very structured in his timing too of when to pay what to paint I think he has like a calendar type schedule where he knows from year to year what areas that would have the right light to be in that spot for X amount of time I stopped at landscapes looked at and looked at him I just wasn't seeing it it wasn't working for me five years later I'm asked the same landscape and all of a sudden it hits me wow this is what I can do with it many good painters like to rearrange a scene to make the composition work better McVicar never dust us he paints it as it really is nothing's idealized nothing is generic he has to see it to paint it you're out painting and the clouds blow over you get the wind comes up there's all these elements out in nature that are incredibly frustrating but it's that I think that's all part of it that makes to me for better work McVicar almost never pains from photographs he's not a posted on principle it just doesn't excite him Jim will never pay from the photograph that's why his paintings are so lifelike if you came from a photograph you're gonna get a painting of a photograph he never pays from photos ooh not that I've known I mean he's he may take a few reference photos but very rarely paints from them so I think part of why he's so good as he is really he is out there every day looking at life and and he's painting what he sees he's painting what he really sees at that particular time I tried painting from photographs a little bit the landscape and it just I think I did four or five paintings and they were okay but it at one point I just went what am I doing this for it wasn't for me it wasn't interesting I mean I have lots of painter friends that use photographs and do great things with it but it didn't move me it wasn't it wasn't a passionate experience and I need that in my work so I started setting up still lifes which was another way to work from life I started getting involved in painting figurative work painting portraits even in these indoor paintings he's always seeing the light and the air in the room he loves plants so in his still-life paintings he often includes one or more of the potted plants that he and his wife had been pampering for years some of his indoor still lifes are they're big paintings a lot of them huge beautiful paintings and they have so much air and atmosphere in them sometimes there's a window in the background and if the window is not like a breaking point it's just a continuous part of the space in the painting there's so much eerie feeling that they're almost landscapes there's atmosphere in the interior just as there is in your outside breathing the air and so that is a quality that I really go after in life still like painting kind of like the the unseen things that I'm also trying to get outdoors in my painting through exploration and trial error he has learned how to incorporate the element of space into the design of the painting and for instance he will when he first sets up the design and he's drawing all the lines and basically getting the objects in place sometimes it looks it looks awkward it's very interesting to me that now some of the still lives will look very awkward at the beginning and by the he finishes putting the finishing touches that reveal the space that he has been looking into the composition looks absolutely perfect there was a period where he started to introduce almost photo realism into certain sections of his paintings and in this particular one if if you know photography it has a certain depth of field and there's certain areas that are just incredible focused almost photo-real and then it goes off into a blur off into the background and he didn't have that before and when you get up close of course it's just brushstrokes it's it's in some cases fairly coarse brushstrokes but when you stand back it almost looks photographic he also paints portraits including many self-portraits which often show a man looking very intently at a painting I sat for many months probably two to three hours at a time in that same position he used so much green and I was so fascinated by that I would ask him what are you painting right now you know you're using so much green and he'd say your face I do feel actually sometimes like I'm sitting and looking at somebody else that there's somebody really they're supposed to a photograph where I say oh that's that's me that's a spitting image of me and then you move on but here you said and you absorb the different things in the painting sometimes I find myself focusing on the floorboards the floor is amazing the detail in the floorboards and the flowers the roadies the calla lilies and I love my hand because when I see my hand in this painting I'm looking at my mother's hand I'm not sure but I think this is a lady called Madame Kuala who was a radio show host back years ago and this setting is in an old hotel which was a bordello and in downtown your Eureka and Jim and his wife Terry had their shop downstairs and this was on the third floor on empty floor just a floor above where they work and so it was in his setting and I it just captures an essence of someone who is not necessarily joyous but definitely present the remainings that are gone that I actually do miss and I've seen a painting here and there that I wish I still had in my possession but all in all years ago I made a real mental transition in my head that this is the way I survive I don't have money coming in from any other source I make a living selling work and so I am able to let go of the piece but it's very satisfying to have somebody buy a piece of work whether it's a landscape or still life or a person that is painting McVicar constantly looks and really sees as his painting what he sees he paints and if you look at the painting for a while you sort of learn to see things as he does you almost feel like you haven't been appreciating this particular kind of beauty until now in all his paintings there is a sense of freedom that maybe comes from the freedom he feels as he paints this is an artist who never worries about making a mistake because he knows he can always change it for the better if something doesn't work I've always believed that working spontaneously and quickly is one of the best ways to learn to paint and to learn how to make decisions to learn how to deal with values deal with color deal with edges he has mastered his medium and as he works on a painting he experiments constantly trying it one way changing this adjusting that gym style if you look at the painting it looks extremely loose and free as if it was almost effortless to do it you don't see any carefully chiseled lines or things that look like they were over painted everything just looks harmonious and and sort of happy and I think it's because of his painting style where he has so much freedom and he paints so quickly he's so accurate every time he wants to mix a little paint and put on the canvas they can do it many times each minute he can he can do more painting in an hour than most most people could do all day and on top of that he doesn't work mine work an hour after hour there's nothing he'd rather do and he just enjoys working on a painting it all comes out in the finished painting as this sort of happy confident appearance he always works over the whole painting moving it along all together never overworking one area and keeping the harmony that seems to appear in the first 10 minutes work watching him work on one it seems that he produces a whole series of paintings each of them beautiful before finally arriving at the one he was looking for all along there's no static 'no sin his work so many people that are technically good they lose the the bounce that reality has the way that light bounces around off of objects and the way we see we don't see the whole thing our eyes of dance around all over the object all the time and relate to different things for each individual even and Jim picks out some of those things that he responds to and makes it accessible to the viewer you it's a way to make the world better in a small way as showing people the beauty that's around them all the time and everything that is the smallest thing that's maybe seemingly insignificant is the most significant thing it's the beauty that we live in in the place we live in allows us to to view that and see that all the time and we're trying to really just record our interpretation of being here and share it everything is alive I mean words too real all just part of this whole mess of nature and so to me it's like I'm out there in a sense monitoring sounds corny but honoring the landscape because ultimately that is so much more important than anything I'm going to paint or anything do what else is painted I mean all that's knowing time going to just disappear just like us just trying to see the shapes see the values see the color and think of every object in the painting not so much as an object but a shape and getting playing with those planes you know things moving back and you can really simplify that way there's a lot of busyness going on a fair amount of detail without being overly detailed you know from a distance it reads really like that blue aqua color and that's just reflected light on there but it picks up this beautiful beautiful color and then those little notes of the orange with the floats and the life preserver on the boat and then just picking it up a little bit some of the rusty stuff on the other boat I first picked up a paintbrush and started painting in 1973 my girlfriend at the time was he still is an artist she was at a number of art history books other books individual artists in our homes and I started looking at those books and became more and more fascinated by painting in particular I was looking at the French impressionist painters so she had given me a small set I think it was acrylic paints and I started doing copies of Sicily Pissarro Toulouse Lautrec various artists of the late 19th century and that was the starting point for me that I realized this was something I wanted to do so I started taking some courses in a Community College started reading more about art history started reading a lot more books and just looking at a lot of different artists but my primary focus was the late 19th century work it was 1973 and in 1975 like I decided I wanted to be a full-time painter and I quit my job and I moved from Southern California to Northern California and started painting full-time and I was going outdoors doing some landscapes my once I got away from doing the copies my earliest paintings were just going out on the spot that's the way I thought one would learn how to paint a landscape and that's what what the painters I was admiring and looking at their work that's what they did I then in 1975 also saw a movie entitled painters painting which was about Abstract Expressionism in paintings of the 30s 40s 50s people like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock and de Kooning and you know all the names were familiar with and I was fascinated by that work for that so for the next almost two years I painted primarily a more abstract style although a lot of my work related to the landscape but it was all studio work all done from my imagination and I moved up here to Humble County in 1977 and about 1979 late 78 I met George Van Hook Curtis autumn Jim Moore a few other painters and they were all painting directly from life which was what I originally had been interested in and I started to go out with Van Hook in particular painting landscapes and we literally painted together really every day for probably two years if not between two and three years and I never kind of looked back after that point I knew that you know that was my original love and painting with landscape I still have as if not a greater love for the landscape than I did in the early years I think you start to gain more and more respect for it and some understanding of what you're trying to do as a painter but it also you know is endless surprises and I think that keeps each painting very interesting look at the like this little green line I think most painters wouldn't even see that and look at them and there's such a subtle variation at all of his tones it's so it's it's poetic it's so beautiful the way that he's able to manipulate the tone is just a little to get the light moving across the land and across the the trees and back it you know it's just a wonderful thing to see how skilled he is at his meeting after a certain point I think in this kind of painting you're a seeker of truth you're really wanting to to discover the truth and you want to tell the truth I don't want painting to be a thing where you sort of learn a craft and then your work becomes very crafty and so you're you're you go oh I know how to paint trees I know how to paint grass I know how to paint mountains I want to make clouds and all to do this and pretty soon that's what the work looks like so I want that's why I say that the landscape always inform me and to not not come up with generic ideas of what things are supposed to look like people come up with all that niblets like so much fun and it is fun I mean I wouldn't do it if I wasn't fun with it too but it's work you know it's it's hard work and it's a stress at a time there are times when you know absolutely hate when I'm working and and I have to push through that and get to the other side of that to where it's starting to feel like it's working again some were on the north coast by about seven o'clock in the morning Jim McVicker will be standing there and seeing all the beauty and color at some lovely place you'll be looking at the scene for a few minutes kind of soaking it in before he starts to paint you as a paints you'll be looking up every few seconds seeing the whole picture seeing it his way and painting it the way he sees when we think about mass amount of humanity there is now a mass amount of resources we use I tend to think that landscape painting might be more important than ever before you know any landscape painter is out there animate they have them they love it on their presenting it that expression that love of nature to the the world and I think more people need to see that students understand how absolutely important you you but you

Channel: jimmcvickerpaints

Views: 326,925

Rating: 4.8917718 out of 5

Keywords: Documentary, Jim McVicker, Artist, Landscape Painting, Plein Air, Fine Art, Oil Painting, Drawing, Humboldt County, Northern California, Portrait, Still Life, Gallery, Art

Id: _Vpgg-Pa4p0

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 26 2012