NEW YORK A veteran painter with an impressive arsenal of studio skills and multilayered cultural references, James McGarrell persists in his engaging, go-it-alone eccentricity. Both a realist (of sorts) and a fantasist, he shows bravura technical breadth as a draftsman...

MCGARRELL IN VERMONT

In 1963, when John Coltrane recorded “I Want to Talk about You” on the album Live at Birdland, it was common practice to put a four bar break at the end of a piece, allowing a single instrument to chart, in abrupt silence, an abstract height from wh...

BLUE AND WHITE

In the order of our daily perceptions, black-and-white is simply the other reality – the one

that’s not in color. Its presence is a part of our lives in movies, photographs, newspapers, as well as art – so much so that we accept its verisimilitude of the...

To paint on a wall. ---It is the vandal's nighttime misdemeanor. It remains the high noon of all human pursuit. Naturally our parents punished us for doing it. It implied we were ungrateful for the blankness they'd provided. Something illicit still attends even the mos...

 YOUNG AND OLD

James McGarrell’s first solo exhibition took place in 1955, at the Frank Perls Gallery in Los Angeles (the same year that McGarrell, age 25, received a Fulbright). Forty years later, his work is one of the bearing walls of contemporary American painting....