Craig McPherson Clairton Works (Coal Piles) 2004 Oil on Panel 36" x 18"

raig McPherson was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1948. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas in 1970, he spent the following years curating and lecturing for the National Endowment for the Arts, before taking up residence in New York in 1975 to develop a career as an artist.

In 1983, McPherson had his first one-man exhibition at the A.M. Sachs Gallery in New York. McPherson next devoted his energies to printmaking, producing mezzotints of New York City at night. These prints led to a corporate art commission for the American Express Company for a 90-foot mural cycle for the auditorium of their corporate headquarters at the World Financial Center (WFC). This series of oil paintings is composed of four panels titled, Twilight: The Waterways and Bridges of Manhattan. In January 1987, the Harbors of the World mural cycle was initiated by American Express for the lobby of their New York WFC headquarters. This vast undertaking involved ten paintings 365 feet long by 11 feet high. This project involved traveling the world for one year, and studio work for four years. The murals depict the harbor cities -- New York, Venice, Istanbul, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong. They are on permanent view in the American Express lobby and are referenced in a new book, Art in Public Places: New York's 50 Best, by David Masello.

McPherson has had a number of one-man gallery shows in New York and has been in group exhibitions all over the world. He's also had a number of smaller corporate and museum commissions. In 1998 he had his first museum retrospective at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University, England. The show traveled to Glasgow, Scotland.

McPherson's work is included in numerous museum, corporate and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. These include The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The British Museum, London; The Art Institute of Chicago; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Boston Public Library; The Carnegie Institute of Art, Pittsburgh; The Cleveland Museum; The Detroit Fine Arts Institute; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England; The Hunterian, Glasgow; The Library of Congress; National Museum of American Art, Washington; The Smithsonian Institution; The New York Historical Society; Museum of the City of New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Wichita Art Museum; The San Francisco Museum of Fine Art; and many smaller city and university collections. Corporate collections include Alliance Capital, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp, Dreyfus, Exxon, General Electric, Marsh McLennan, MBIA, Microsoft Corporation, Salomon Brothers, Wrigley's Inc. and others.

McPherson has won art awards, been reviewed in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Artnews, The New York Post, The Observer and other publications. He is a member of The Century Association in New York.

Craig McPherson: Yes. I graduated from there in 1970.

Art Interview: What was the school like?

Craig McPherson Pastel

Art Interview: Did you study printmaking there?

Craig McPherson: I took two courses in printmaking but I was mostly interested in painting and drawing.

Art Interview: What styles were predominant at the school?

Craig McPherson: Well, there was a visiting artist named Edward Avedisian who came in 1968. He was a New York artist pushing color field painting and a lot of the students gravitated towards him. It didn't interest me much. I was going in my own direction, which was expressionistic, throwing paint around, figurative, high color fantasy paintings of jungles and my own mythology, using very thick paint.

Craig McPherson "Self-Portrait - The night I got my draft number", Watercolor on paper 1969

Craig McPherson: Oh yeah. Expressionism is very seductive, but it is hit or miss. I would do 300 paintings a year keep 5 and burn the rest. Now I do 5 paintings a year but they are all keepers. I don't know if I'm ahead of the game or not. Throwing paint around was a lot more fun. (Laugh) Eventually I realized that the expressionistic approach was too hit or miss for me. I wanted more control. The expressionistic painters that I liked most, late Rembrandt, late Goya and late Titian, really knew how to use paint. They had all gone through a training period of tight painting and it was a gradual progression for them toward letting go. So I decided to follow their method and bank the fire, rein in and learn some technique and then hopefully have a progressive loosening. Eventually you can put technique aside but I thought in order to put technique aside you have to go through technique. So that is what I have tried to do.

Art Interview: Did you began to tighten your technique after you had graduated from the university?

Craig McPherson: About seven years later. When I graduated in 1970 I knew I didn't want to go to graduate school. It just seemed pointless to me. We had the draft going on because of the Viet Nam war but I managed to dodge that. I found myself kind of at loose ends. I really didn't know what I was going to do with myself but I just happened into a project. The State Arts Council approached me. They had an artist-in-residency coming available and they asked me if I would be interested in applying for it. So I applied but I didn't get it. Shortly thereafter there was another project that came along called the Mobile Gallery. It was a 1948 semi-trailer that had been converted into a traveling art gallery and was sponsored by the Wichita Art Museum. I got a good recommendation and ended up working with them for two years. I would go to 35 towns in Kansas and spend 2 or 3 days lecturing over the course of a year to about 30,000 school kids. I put together some fairly interesting shows: a show of Picasso's graphic work for his 90th birthday from his blue period to his late linocuts and I got the Mexican government to lend a show of the history of Mexican art from 1,500 BC to the present day. They were really decent shows.

Art Interview: Were you working for the Wichita Art Museum and showing original artworks in the Mobile Gallery?

Craig McPherson Drawing

Art Interview: How long exactly were you able to paint full time in Wichita before heading to New York?

Craig McPherson: About two years. A year after returning I went back to the Mobile Gallery job, but just as a consultant setting up shows and hiring lecturers to travel. During that time I was painting and drawing full time. I did extensive work drawing and writing journals while I was on the road.

Art Interview: While you were in Kansas did you focus on the style that you have now?

Craig McPherson: No, it was a transitional period. I was trying to find my way. I didn't have a style. I was trying a lot of different styles. I would do a style for about six months and absorb it and then I would move on to another one. I was looking at everything. I was looking at a lot of pre-Columbian work. I was looking at New York Realism and west coast work like Richard Diebenkorn and Parks. I was trying everything. I didn't feel any need to settle on a particular style: it was an educational process for me. I didn't hit on a style or find my technique until I moved to New York in 1975.

Craig McPherson Clairton Works (River) 2002-2005 Oil on Linen 86" x 60"

Craig McPherson: 27

Art Interview: What drove you to New York.

Craig McPherson: Well, I was desperate to get out of Kansas. I had been trying to for years but I just never had enough money and didn't know anyone here. I was offered a job as a studio assistant. The gallery that was supporting me gave a show to a New York artist named Knox Martin. I had been painting in his style for about three months when he came to Wichita for the opening of his show and when he saw that he had a disciple there he was very flattered, of course. So he offered me a job as his studio assistant. He didn't have any money but he had two studios, one that he worked and lived in and one that he stored huge paintings in that had an extra room where I could live and work. He was only paying $50 a month for the loft. It was the top floor of a former ice factory that was owned by the city. He needed a caretaker, somebody who would keep an eye on the place so nobody would break in. Two or three times a year I would do something for him. It wasn't much of a job. (Laugh) He was doing me an enormous favor.

Art Interview: Were you working part time jobs?

Craig McPherson: Yes and no. The first year in New York I was still a consultant for the Mobile Gallery and I got $1,500 that year. Then they caught up to me. Found out that I had moved to New York. (Laugh) I didn't get my project renewed the next year. No, that first year I lived on $1,500. The second year I can't even remember how I got by. I know I traded paintings for food with a little Hispanic restaurant and I did a couple of sign paintings for a Greek restaurant and they gave me free food for a few weeks. But that year I doubt if I even made $1,000. But I had a free place to live so I only had to pay for food, art supplies and the subway. It was a rough year.

Art Interview: What type of art were you making at that point?

Craig McPherson Yankee Stadium (Detail) Mezzotint on Paper 23 7/8" x 35 1/2"

The life of the neighborhood was interesting to me, coming from Kansas. The local cottage industry at that time was stripped cars; chop shops. They took stolen cars to these little "auto repair" shops where they would take them apart. The cars, both new and old, were worth a lot more in spare parts than they were whole. I watched them strip these cars to the bone. It just fascinated me. I did a whole series of prints and paintings based on the chop shops. When the shops had finished they would leave the stripped cars out on the street, after they took all the good pieces. And the next group of entrepreneurs would come around (Laugh) and take what was left until it was basically a shell. Finally, this little guy from the city would come around and pick up what was left. He had a flatbed truck and he could get three of them stacked on top of each other and he would haul them away. It was a whole economy of its own! (Laugh) And of course there were drugs. It was drugs and stripped cars. By the early 80s the area down from the George Washington Bridge was the center of the crack trade in Manhattan. It was an open-air supermarket for drugs on 168th Street. That was a trip in itself. It got pretty dangerous. I would often carry fairly large paintings around to show my friends in the various restaurants what I was up to, but also so that the dealers would see that I wasn't a cop, a dealer or a customer. It seemed to work, they left me alone.

Art Interview: Were you primary doing your cityscapes or were you focusing on painting chopped cars at that time?

Craig McPherson

Art Interview: Mezzotint is an unusual process that is not often done.

Craig McPherson: It is arguably the rarest form of printmaking today, along with line engraving. The reason it is so rare is because it is the most labor intensive of all printmaking techniques.

Craig McPherson: You have a tool called a rocker, which is a serrated tool. It looks like a chisel. At that time they were about two and a half to three inches wide. It has a single row of teeth of varying grades. They go from100 teeth per inch to I think I have one that is 35 teeth per inch, really big teeth. (Laugh) It has a handle like a chisel and you rock it sideways which leaves a zigzag of pits as you move up the plate. You then rock overlapping rows eventually in all directions, very systematically. When finished you will have a surface that is completely pitted. There are no smooth or shiny spots anywhere. If you printed the plate at that point it would be solid black. It is the blackest black you can get in printmaking. It is like an impasto of black ink embedded in the paper. To create the image, if you are doing what I do, which is working from life, I take the drawing, the schematic that I have done and transfer it to frosted acetate. which I then flip, because whenever you do a print it comes out in a mirror, reverse, image. If you want it to look in the final stage on paper as it does in life you have to work in reverse. I next transfer the schematic to the rocked plate using carbon paper and then working from life on-site I create the image; the atmospheric effects, the lights in the windows, all the details, the cars down below, etc., Using burnishers and scrapers, I carefully smooth out the roughened surface so that in areas that are completely smooth the ink wipes completely away and you have white. In areas that are relatively rougher you will have an infinite variety of shades of gray. You have to do it in reverse and that's the tricky part. You are looking at it in one way and you flip it in your mind to get the mirror image. It has an inherent logic. Once you get into it and you are in a groove it's not so hard. But at the beginning it is tricky.

Art Interview: I can imagine. What type of tool do you use to make the drawing on the plate?

Art Interview: Who introduced you to this technique?

Craig McPherson: Well, in 1977 or 78 I was approached by a publishing company to do some work for them and I had drawings ready to convert into prints. I really didn't know anything about printmaking, I had taken a couple of courses but I'd never pulled an edition. I was a complete novice. They hired a master printer named Mohammad Omer Khalil, to work with me. He took the drawings, which were very subtle detailed drawings, and tried to do photo etchings with aquatint of them. But it was much too coarse for what I wanted. He was printing the work of a woman who did mezzotints and I said this is more like what I want. He tried to discourage me. He said you really don't want to do this it is much too time-consuming and difficult. I asked where I could get the tools. He told me to go to a company called EC Lyons just a few blocks away. So I bought the tools and started experimenting. It was trial and error. It didn't take that long to figure out though.

Craig McPherson (Detail) Mezzotint on Paper

Art Interview: How many prints of Yankee Stadium did you make?

Craig McPherson: There are 90 in the edition: 75 and 15 artist's proofs. I probably pulled 15 to 20 trial proofs and I had a 40%+ loss rate so add another 50. So in totaled I probably pulled something like 150-160 proofs off that plate. It was a very difficult print technically. I used two different viscosities of ink in order to get the kind of hazy, foggy feel the print has. It's of Yankee Stadium on the horizon with a big sky. It is very abstract. It looks like a UFO has landed. There is kind of a light emerging out of this bowl and there is a fog or a fine mist, which you would often see on hazy summer nights illuminated by the stadium lights. In order to get that kind of transparency along the horizon I used very, very thinned- out ink. It was like soup. The rest of the plate I used a stiffer ink. The technical problem of making the transition between the two inks resulted in a 40% loss rate. Mezzotint is subtle and it is so fragile that it is a race against time because every time you pull a print the plate deteriorates a bit. You can only pull so many trial proofs or you are risking the edition. When you've committed that kind of time up front you can't play around too much. It is a high risk medium.

Craig McPherson Mural with Yankee Stadium (Detail)

Craig McPherson: Yes, American Express bought it for their collection. They had just moved to a new building in lower Manhattan: into the new World Financial Center building designed by Cesar Pelli. They were commissioning an artist to create a mural for the lobby of the corporate auditorium on the 26th floor. I was one of 3 finalists in the running for the commission.

Art Interview: Was that a competition or did they approach you because they had previously bought the "Yankee Stadium at Night" piece?

Craig McPherson: They had a corporate art consultant who approached us . She settled on 3 artists and asked us to make presentations.

Art Interview: How did she learn about you?

Want to read the whole interview? You have two options: Subscribe Now and receive the current issue of Art Interview Online Magazine and all of the back issues. Or Enter the Art Interview - International Online Artists’ Competition and receive the current issue of Art Interview Online Magazine and all of the back issues for FREE The competition is an international, juried, exhibition of paintings drawings and sculptures in any media, open to all living artists worldwide whom are over the age of 16. If you are already a subscriber please log in at the top right hand corner of any page.

This oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Craig McPherson on Septembr 16, 2005. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and New York, New York, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.