Catching Up With the Contemporary “Action Painting” of Peg McCreary.
Artist review by J. Sanders Eaton, GALLERY&STUDIO (Nov.-Dec. 2006).

Peg McCreary keeps the faith; which is to say: she is one of the few painters today who exemplifies the ethos of what Clement Greenberg termed “American-Type Painting,” what some call “Action Painting,” what others think of as “New York School” painting, and what most of us still refer to as Abstract Expressionism. Moreover, she does so without seeming in the least bit retrograde or resorting to the distancing strategies that any number of her contemporaries use to justify working in a manner that goes against the prevailing conceptual grain.

In McCreary’s case, not only does her faith in the primal vitality of pure gestural expression pay off handsomely, but it proves once again that this species of painting can be every bit as relevant (if not as revolutionary) today as it was when the explosive emergence of Pollock, de Kooning & Company first established New York City as the art center of the world. The proof is everywhere evident in McCreary’s exhibition at the Cornell Medical Center Lobby Gallery, 12 West 72nd Street, through December 28.

McCreary still speaks of painting the way artists did in the Tenth Street era, when the conversations held in the now-gentrified cold water lofts or at the legendary Artists Club were not all about how to make gallery connections or schmooze curators and collectors, as they all too often are today, when she says, “Abstraction is not allegory; it is not a one-to-one correspondence between the object in the virtual space of the canvas and its referent in the actual space of our lives. But we sense a deep morphic resonance between the composition, colors and spaces on a canvas and the rhythms, moods, and conflicts of our lives, and it is to the increasingly rich visualization of this resonance that my work is committed.”

One of the most interesting facets of McCreary’s work is that the resonance of which she speaks shifts easily between her inner and outer worlds. Her sinuously linear brushwork (which seems to spring directly from the artist’s nervous system as if it were an actual monitor of her biological impulses) alternately delineates turns and twists in her personal journey (“Traversal No. 2”), her reactions to a film by Stanley Kubrick, (“Odyssey, No. 10”) or her response to nature – particularly “lush vegetation emerging from a phosphorescent lake” (“Blue Grotto”).

Working either in oil or acrylic on canvas – choosing the former, one presumes, when a subject requires its dense viscosity and the latter when its quick-drying properties are called for – McCreary apparently proceeds with the certainty of a painterly conquistador, engaging a complex range of challenges with her vigorous handling of pigment to capture the flow and flux of her feelings in form and color, unmediated by the cautious strategizing that characterizes so much postmodern artistic enterprise. Immediacy and sensuality are the keynotes of the oil on canvas “Blue Grotto,” with its deep blue hues merging muscularly with milky white impasto to achieve a surface at once smoky and succulent, while rhythm and speed distinguish the acrylic on canvas “Traversal,” where the paint quality is somewhat thinner and the composition is driven by a whiplash linearity.

Qualities of both are combined in “Glissando,” where acrylic takes on the tactile richness of oil, yet the composition is animated primarily by a calligraphic swiftness, further enlivened by the artful placement of subsidiary splashes and drips. Here, the title, which refers to a rapid sliding up and down the musical scale, alludes specifically to the artist’s background as a former professional musician, playing double bass with several symphony orchestras. However, it is the innate musicality of Peg McCreary’s work that makes all of the paintings in this exhibition equally exhilarating.

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