John Defeo

Even if You Aren't Sure, Something Out There Knows Right Where You Are

2018

This whimsically tall painting is a portrait of a black bear. There is a golden blue sky with clouds behind the bear's head. "Deconstructed" is hand written on the light gold frame. The painting is done in oils, and the frame is included with the painting. Biography Robert McCauley was born and raised in Mt. Vernon, Washington. He graduated from Western Washington University in 1969, and received his Master of Fine Arts Degree from Washington State University in 1972. Throughout his career, McCauley has earned many prestigious awards including a Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 and the Illinois Arts Council in 1999. McCauley also enjoyed a long and distinguished career as professor and Chairman of the Art Department at Rockford College in Illinois. Robert McCauley has created a mode of realism that is haunting and full of ambiguity. His distinctive animals manage to seem literal and symbolic at the same time, the viewer is suspended between these realms. Wild Life "We are losing our relationship with Nature. I aspire to re-tether some of the connections." -Robert McCauley Robert McCauley is an important 21st century American artist, and history will remember him as such. But in order to understand why, we first must consider where he is from and how he got here. A little less than a decade ago, McCauley was featured at a major exhibition in Chicago and he was quoted as saying then, "I think you spend all your life trying to find the right form for the content you have within you." Urban, Midwestern visitors who viewed the show were enthralled. Make no mistake about the source of McCauley's inner content: He is a product of America's greatest forest-the mighty aboriginal stands of fir, spruce, cedar and redwoods growing in the Pacific Northwest. Those skyscraping canopies once reservoired a breathtaking array of ecological richness and diversity, from streams choked with spawning salmon to massive grizzliesl wapiti and deer haunting the understories, raptors screeching through the misty, arboreal heavens, and the loom of an ever-present ocean. As the totem poles and amulets of native peoples attest, the life forces of nature there are planted indelibly into the human psyche. Robert McCauley's too. When I think of where McCauley fits into American art, as a contemporary painter, sculptor and naturalistic interpreter, I place him in the same philosophical tribe as Walton Ford, Alexis Rockman, Annie Coe...

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