Tire Iron 51: Dan McCleary

by Bill Davenport June 2, 2005

Dan McCleary paints everyday people and happenings with a low-intensity psychological realism, building calm, careful cardboard simulations of everyday life, a dollhouse where his characters play out scenes of control, servitude, and identity, as expressed in the nuances of trivial events.

Dan McCleary... Shampoo... 2005... Oil on canvas... 42 1/2 x 36 1/2 inches


Each painting hints at a precise psychological state, but the states McCleary chooses to portray are so nearly blank that it’s easy to attribute them to bad painting. In Shampoo, a heavy-faced woman’s outsized hand is embedded possessively in the thick, dark hair of a young Hispanic man, but her face has the emphatic detachment of a nurse changing a bedpan.

McCleary works to preserve the individuality of his characters despite uniforms, name tags and stereotypical roles. In County Fair, a man and a bonsai tree each occupy exactly half of the painting, like two specimens side-by-side on a microscope slide for comparison. The man and the tree are both exotic and wonderful creatures, both stunted and constrained: one by a tight pot, the other by a dark jacket and helmet-like coiffure. The tree’s sparse but frantic burst of leaves suggests a similar energy in the man’s hair waiting to be released.

In The Application, the tension is right on the surface. A young African-American woman and an elegant rubber plant are wedged into a claustrophobic office cubicle with a boxy-faced Asian man and his computer terminal. Her businesslike hair-bun is as tightly twisted as her stomach, his face is as blank as the empty post-it note on the bulletin board behind his head. The man is the embodiment of the corporation: intimidatingly bland. The woman is a perfect portrait of affected casualness; one can feel the effort it cost her to pry her forearm from her lap and drape it casually across the desk. By illustrating such a stereotypical situation, McCleary gains and loses: The Application is one of the most accessible, yet least curious works in the show.

Dan McCleary... County Fair... 2005... Oil on canvas... 29 1/4 x 36 3/4 inches

McCleary is interested in specific individuals, not types. Compare the two portraits of Casey and Azadeh: both wear uniforms with name tags, posing as counter help in the same convenience store backdrop. But while Casey has a faint satirical smile, as if he knows he’s posing in his ridiculous costume for a painting; Azadeh stares forward with an confrontational sullenness. McCleary’s desire to tell stories goes beyond the paintings themselves. Appended to the price list is a sheaf of handwritten notes with chatty comments like “Azadeh was born in Iran, raised in San Antonio, Texas, and moved to Los Angeles to persue [sic] acting.”, and “Casey Sullivan is an acting student-I have known him since he was two.” That we want to know such biographical tidbits is a measure of McCleary’s success in making us care.

Ten of the twelve people in McCleary’s paintings are non-white. It’s surprising that that’s surprising, but it is. Like Edward Hopper, McCleary depicts arid slices of American life, but the average American has changed. Hopper’s pasty Anglos are now vaguely Hispanic, Asian, or African-American,but the quintessentially American blankness is the same. McCleary casts his multicultural models as nurses, hairdressers, and convenience-store clerks. The patently artificial blue-collar settings only highlight the fact that these people have identities separate from their jobs, and suggests also that their individuality is usually overlooked. McCleary doesn’t seem to have a racial ax to grind, but his presentation of so many people of color with so little comment is inherently radical.

Dan McCleary... The Application... 2003/2004... Oil on canvas; 37 1/4 x 44 3/4 inches


McCleary’s paintings have an earnest, amateurish style that’s difficult to classify, which makes people uneasy. They lack the predigested conceptual spin that’s come to be expected of “professional” art in an increasingly academic artworld. The stiff, paper-doll poses of his figures, and the backdrops full of self-consciously placed objects recall exercises in intermediate painting: generic bottles, boxes, and cups clutter every horizontal surface, while equally generic mirrors, air conditioner vents, counters and framed boards break up every wall. The awkwardness of the painting style is the perfect vehicle for McCleary’s edgy, repressed psycho-drama, half truth-telling documentary and half filmic fiction.

Images courtesy Texas Gallery.

Bill Davenport is an artist and writer and was one of the first contributor to Glasstire.

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