About your Host: Xanda McCagg
From the article
Artist in Profile: Xanda McCagg
By JORDANA ZELDIN
In
the artist statement on her website, Chelsea-based abstract painter
Xanda McCagg (pronounced zan-da) sites her fascination with “human
experience” as the driving force in her work. Human Experience—it’s a
broad idea, sure, but when I ask her to elaborate, she demonstrates what
she means in physical terms. “I’m interested in how things shift,” she
begins. “If I’m standing over there, versus if I come up to you and
touch you.” She walks over to me and brushes up against my arm. That she
incorporated movement into her explanation makes perfect sense. Her
canvases, many of them human-size, project a similar sense of motion-
quick, energetic lines, bright colors bumping up against one another (as
opposed to sitting passively side by side) give us a sense that
something is happening, that interactions are taking place between the
various forms and textures.
If one looks closely, one can still
see traces of McCagg’s traditional figurative training from over 20
years ago buried within her recent abstract works. Her decision to paint
expressionistically after years of classical study (first at Boston
University and later at the School of Visual Arts) came not from a
flat-out rejection of those modes of working but rather from a “strong
curiosity” to push herself further, to explore the full potential of the
medium. Abstract Expressionism allowed her to break free from the
strict techniques that, while invaluable to a deeper understanding of
the origins of painting, limited her ability to fully realize her
vision.
As we walk around the studio, McCagg points to and pulls
out canvas after canvas that span the entirety of her painting career.
Her work has clearly evolved since she began. I can’t help but notice
that there’s more white space (or “negative shapes,” as she calls them)
in her recent pieces than in those from the early days. They are no less
impactful, however, and if anything, the empty space makes the more
“active” sections of the paintings seem all the more so. For McCagg, the
larger empty spaces are indicators that “I’m saying what I want to say
with less.” It brings to mind haiku, the distillation of a complex idea
into three carefully crafted lines.
More than anything, McCagg
wants to stimulate our emotions with her varied compositions. Although
artists such as Jackson Pollack have clearly been aesthetic influences,
when our conversation shifts to Francis Bacon, Picasso, and
Michelangelo’s David, she doubles over in wonder; the very thought of
their work seems to get in the gut. What they do is precisely what she
wants her paintings to do, to “stop people in their tracks,” to engage
the viewer on both an emotional and intellectual level, to transcend the
present day, to feel both timeless and universal.
Human
interactions have shifted more than ever (thanks to the advent of
facebook, twitter, and do-it-all-on-the-go mobile devices) and when I
ask McCagg if her paintings have changed in response to these shifts,
she pauses. Is she aware of what’s going on? Absolutely, but she
maintains that there’s a certain “unchanging animal nature about us.”
Like her semicircular journey as a painter (from the figurative, to the
more abstract, to what she calls a period of “total abstraction,” to
where she is now- somewhere in between the two extremes), she remains
convinced that as human beings, no matter what we dip our toes into or
what seemingly far-flung territory we decide to explore, “we often
arrive somewhere back at the same place.” Xanda’s work can be viewed
on her website, www.xandamccagg.com as well as on the North side of 23rd
Street between 9th and 10th Avenues as part of ArtBridge: First
Exposure 2009.
REVIEW OF OUR TOURS | PAINTINGS BY XANDA McCAGG
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