“Composure that Receives Illumination”
Essay by Arthur Hall Smith, printed in the brochure accompanying Kevin’s 1977 show at the Phillips Collection.
With those words the late Rolfe Humphries tried in one of his poems to describe his own poetry. Humphries' phrase has occurred to me again and again over the years when encountering the drawings of Kevin MacDonald, for what one sees so often in MacDonald's work is earthly design caught in heavenly light. The mark of the classicist is the ability to extract a notion of the ideal from the data of the actual. This MacDonald, like Ingres before him, does repeatedly in his drawing through the selectivity of his eye and the assurance of his hand.
From the very beginning his drawings have proclaimed MacDonald's mastery of technique of the highest order. It is a technique where the desired subtlety of touch requires that patience bridle passion. What I find to have grown and expanded in the continuing exhibitions of his work is MacDonald's sensitivity, in the Piero-Seurat tradition, toward more complex design, and an increased feeling for silhouette and for spatial ambiguity.
There are passages in the drawings of this current exhibition which show Kevin MacDonald at this very best and in areas of sensibility that seem, to me, new to his work. I think, for example, of the iridescent voids that play about the gymnasium walls and ceiling surrounding the beribboned basketball board in one drawing; of the strongly colored tablecloths that float magically between the restaurant booths in another; and of the abstract drawing-within-a-drawing created by the television set reflected in the hotel bureau mirror of a third. This exhibition contains what, to my knowledge, is the first landscape drawing MacDonald has ever shown, one filled with parched urban distance.
For all their considerable virtues of facture and structure, however, MacDonald's drawings fascinate me primarily through their uncanny ability to invest the banal (a rumpled sofa, a department store lamp, lunch counters, washrooms) with portent and mystery. How can mere pencil drawings, often of such modest format and depicting such everyday subject matter, transfix the viewer and hold him so long before them, seemingly outside time?
One can only speculate. The mood of the drawings, while imprecise, is undeniable. It probably derives in large part from the impeccably delicate renderings of the commonplace, a trait MacDonald shares with his artistic ancestors, the precisionists of the 20s. This immaculate touch (MacDonald's gradations seem breathed onto the paper) contributes greatly to the otherworldly quality of light the drawings contain, a quality of aura and repose. In the same way that he manipulates the presentation of everyday objects and environments MacDonald transposes and transfigures natural, ordinary light. This he does so subtly and convincingly that this light itself almost becomes a personality, inhabiting each of his drawings, the tenant of his otherwise unpeopled space.
What results is a paradox; MacDonald's drawings represent so many Proustian portraits of absence . . . but absence, not vacancy. The loving rendering and the warm, serene light which permeate these drawings do not admit to the latter.
For students of fine drawing Kevin MacDonald's work offers many lessons. They would do well to study how he goes beyond the merely linear into a realm where edge and tone merge into a seamless whole; where color is often so subtle as to seem an inference; where positive and negative shapes interlock in a calm, albeit complex, inevitability as they do in the backgrounds of Vermeer.
There is so much to praise: the consummate craft, the discreet vision, the quietude of the inanimate transfigured. But for me the ultimate celebration to be made concerning Kevin MacDonald's drawings should be for their gift of light, their illumination. His art lies finally with it, transcending the coordinates of hand and eye. It is illumination that goes beyond retina and into radiance.