Life in the Studio | Craig McDaniel

LIFE IN THE STUDIO

By Craig McDaniel

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The Montréal Review, May 2025

Craig McDaniel, Small Falconry, acrylic on canvas, 17” (H) x 22”(W)

If asked to describe or explain their art – how it is made, what it means – painters face a choice. They can refuse the invitation – “let the art speak for itself.” They can defer – “let someone else try.” But if an artist chooses to accept the invitation, then she leaves behind the familiar mode of visual expression and enters the strange forest of semantics, word play, language. Dangers abound. She can find herself circling a quicksand of platitudes (art is love; art is truth), tautologies (art is beauty, beauty is art), or simplicities (what you see is all there is).

Approaching from a different angle, the artist can divulge a secret as honest as rehearsed technique: “Here’s how I do it”. This explanation of studio practice may work well for a Sunday painter (who works from a photo to capture the look of a garden at dawn), but subtler concepts are needed to track, say, John Singer Sargent’s transformation of a woman in an evening gown into a new paradigm of beauty where beauty isn’t so much the woman’s face, figure and haut couture but the stunningly stylish facility of Sargent wielding a paintbrush. And, if we expect the artist to contextualize their art theoretically – oh my! – now John Singer Sargent might (where might is right) bring a Marxist critique into play (why does this woman get to afford such expensive, glamorous duds?).

To explore the means and aims of their art, a visual artist could try exploring the process from the ground up: technique produces form, form produces content. You frown, isn’t this another suspicious tautology? Moreover, have we outlined the linkage backwards? Shouldn’t we argue the theme comes first: why decides what, then what decides how. I’m going to lean into this dizzying arena. Such is life; such is art.

The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.
––Bruce Nauman

Lesson in Looking: Art in Real Life

I am a painter. If I’m taking a walk around the neighborhood (maybe through the nearby woods and passing by the pond) – I’m hyper alert to colors, specifically, the relationship of colors seen together: how the dark translucent green trees appear against the gray sky, and how light changes a passing face in an instant, producing a fresh pattern of violet shadows. Perhaps you too are captivated by colors – maybe you adore the glow of dark yellow – but the captivation I seek goes beyond colors as nuanced wavelengths of light; color is feeling, colors become the medium that colors the view. Put a frame around this and, presto, you have the start of a painting.

A viewer armed with more than passing knowledge of art history, might recognize that my art relates to what critics and historians call magical realism. Hearing the term, you may think of certain South American authors (e.g., Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) and the incomparable Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)). Magical realism, however, extends beyond the borders of Latin America (e.g., Salman Rushdie), and beyond the borders of the literary arts. Some of it is lightweight entertainment, other works are serious explorations of the boundaries of art and reality (e.g., Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005)).

This year the term turns 100 years young; it was coined in 1925 to describe German post-expressionist painting during the frenetic calm between two devastating world wars. Application of the term shifted when, in the middle of the 20th century, literary critics began applying it to the strain of new fabulist writing arising, especially, in Latin America. For our purposes, the basic, working definition goes something like this, supplied by literary critic Wendy B. Faris:

Magical realism combines realism and the fantastic so that the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between the two.

Am I a magical realist painter? Can I accept the nomenclature? Like most living artists with serious ambition – knowing the time is not right for signing on to an artists’ Manifesto – I resist pigeonholes. That said, I can’t deny my paintings combine aspects of the everyday with fantastic elements (look at the painting that is illustrated at the start of this essay – notice how bands of light flow across the room). So, I embrace Magical Realism as a theme. A philosophy of reality. I also embrace the term for its political relevance, its capacity to challenge authority – magical realism is a cannon ball shot across the bow of authoritarianism. George Orwell, I think, would approve any form of human expression that resists so fully, as magical realism, the limitations that extreme repression fosters through the cancellation of unfettered thinking and the curtailment of language (i.e., ‘newspeak’ in Orwell’s novel 1984). Far right regimes lose the upper hand in artworks that depict reality where the uncanny happens out of the blue.

Identifying my studio practice with other contemporary magical realist artists, however, opens a pitfall. Today, magical realist painting is so often characterized by refined techniques of photographic realism that this compulsive aesthetic (built on a strict ideology of perfection) channels viewers into judging the worth of any painting by comparing – at the smallest detail – to how a subject would appear through a camera lens. Such a one-dimensional gradient of quality places innumerable valuable artists in low esteem. Painters who navigate subjects and themes that cross the border into magical realism – Marc Chagall, René Magritte, Peter Doig, and Kinuko Y. Craft to name a few – would be shortchanged by any insistence that the goal of representation is to emulate hyper-photographic realism. (This assertion, it should be noted, does not diminish the wondrous qualities of true photographers whose art encapsulates the mysterious and marvelous (e.g., Ralph Eugene Meatyard)). What to do? You wouldn’t want your guests to march up to a painting by Chagall (or Matisse) in your home or office and pass judgement looking through a magnifying glass – would you? I recommend we view paintings in the way they are meant to function. At scale. In a real space. If you’re restricted from seeing the work in person, which, of course, is so often the case, then it is helpful to see an illustration of how the whole painting appears in a setting. This will provide you with more information about the effect the art makes in real life.

Craig McDaniel, Donuts, acrylic on canvas, 42” (H) x 38” (W)

You see the painting from a distance, you see the holistic impact of the entire composition at once; you gauge the scale of the painting in an architectural setting (it makes a difference if the painting is larger than a bed or smaller than a book). You scan for meaningful details (not looking at random close-ups); you explore how plastic form and surface texture enrich the experience of viewing the imagery. Back and forth you toggle – from big view to intimate – giving attention to how everything within the canvas contributes to the overall effect. You also evaluate how the painting functions (this is one reason to call it a work of art) to impact the mood of the room it’s in. A favorite tactic in my studio practice is to bring a painting-in-progress out of the studio and hang it up in the house for a week. This gives me (and Jean!) a chance to see the painting as a part of our lives. How does our view of the painting, seen multiple times from multiple angles, change?

So, I’m amused to admit: I am a painter whose art travels, now and then, into the land of magical realism. This, I think, relates my work to some of the fabulous female Surrealists (Dorothea Tanning, for example). I also recognize a strong relationship between my calling as a visual artist and Modernist predecessors (Pierre Bonnard, for instance), whose power centers on the exploration of color, time, space, sensuality, without any hint of the irrational. At the end of the day, when I’m dying, I want to imagine I’ve made at least a few paintings that captivate; each time the viewer sees the painting I hope they discover something new – & that I too, see it anew.

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue. – Matisse

That’s nice, but I want more than Matisse’s formula, with its emphasis on serenity. I want to entrance the viewer. To be thought-provoking and eye-catching; to mystify, surprise, and, yes, tickle their fancy.

The paintings in my Fall 2024 exhibit at the RJD Gallery in Romeo, Michigan, and my spring, 2025 exhibit at the Indianapolis Art Center, contain a range of subjects and themes, and, always, that concentrated psychological state of being a tad awestruck, freed from pragmatism and logic. Like an image of sleeping outside, the enormous night sky overhead, dazzling us awake, and entering one’s dreams.

Craig McDaniel, Spring Blossoms, acrylic on canvas, 50” (H) x 50” (W), @ RJD Gallery, Romeo, Michigan

What’s in short supply in the serious contemporary art world? Longing is a topic seldom addressed, which is, in my view, a glaring oversight, since what we desire and why we desire are mysterious forces always slightly out of control. There are, to be sure, darker manifestations of lusting after what you cannot have, but I’m talking about more romantic episodes (romance, as in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Being lovesick, or homesick, sentimental, moody. Or admitting to an overwhelming empathy for nature, for providing animals with their own sacred agency. Yes, I love to paint poignancy (how’s that for subject matter?) – knowing the world changes, and what is lost may be something we love. If all this isn’t enough to catch your attention, I add a dollop of what sparkles on top: I hope that touches of wit gleam now and then, here and there, so that the viewer feels delighted by visual discovery as one looks around an expanse of imagery. How does all this play out in a painting? As an example, in the painting Child in a Cat’s Costume (illustrated below) – a fairy tale setting in which indoors and outdoors meld together – the central figure is a child wearing a cat’s costume. In the center of the painting, the eyes of a child peer in one direction (they look out of the painting, making eye contact with a viewer of the painting); simultaneously, the costume contains eyes (the cat’s eyes!!) that look off in another direction; and, lastly, the figure’s shadow comes alive with its own eye peering straight ahead … (Note: these details are easily recognized by a viewer standing before the actual painting, which measures 8 ½ feet in width.)

Craig McDaniel, Child in a Cat Costume, oil and acrylic on canvas, 62” (H) x 102” (W). @ RJD Gallery, Rome, Michigan

Detail. Craig McDaniel, A Child in a Cat Costume

(I hope) people see my art is identifiably (stubbornly?) my own; that my paintings emit the light of the primitive, or naïve artist. (I also hope) they cannot not recognize the care and cunning that structures my compositions. That’s a welcome paradox, from my perspective: to create paintings that exist forcefully in the here & now, while, simultaneously, they call us to consider how they build on the tradition of painting as an ancient art form. These images aren’t transparent windows into another reality. They are, first and foremost, paintings. I use a toolbox of representational, symbolic strategies to experiment with ways painting can be in the 3rd decade of the 21st century. I’m compelled: isn’t it a marvel how paintings can continue to live and breathe for viewers decades, even centuries, after the paint dries?

Craig McDaniel, Driving on the Shoulder, oil on canvas, 42” (H) x 42” (W),@ RJD Gallery, Rome, Michigan

2. First things first

I’m a painter. However, it was only after completing my first MFA degree, in Creative Writing (from the University of Montana), that I turned my attention primarily in the direction of the visual arts. Picture me in my late twenties. A full head of hair! (This was the slow setting sun of the ‘hippie’ era.) Jean and I drove west, from Philly to Wisconsin (with a detour to NY to get married); I took a curatorial position at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan. On the job, I delighted to see the arrival of an array of art objects and images that the JMKAC staff – under the visionary guidance of the art center’s Director, Ruth Kohler – brought to our small, distant outpost on a northern fringe of ‘the art world’.

I saw firsthand that art is not an object or image existing in a vacuum; art is a set of relationships, nesting together, that create layers of meaning for artists, viewers, curators, critics, and collectors. While I was on the inside, I was not on the inside of the inside. I was a Curator of Performing Arts. My province existed alongside the province of the visual art curators. As things turned out, this proved serendipitous, for at that time (and continuing to the present) the art world has been tilting, with increasing momentum, towards a condition in which the boundaries demarcating the visual arts media (painting, sculpture, photography, installation, etcetera) are blurred; and, the boundaries demarcating the arts (visual arts, music, theatre, literature) are similarly blurred.

Working at the Kohler Art Center, I felt increasingly inspired to try my own hand to make art. I didn’t act on this urge, however, for many months. Then, literally, out of the blue: I was given a vision. Sheboygan, Wisconsin, about 150 miles due north of Chicago, can be bitterly cold in the winter (which basically extends from October through April) so taking a hot bath was a go-to pleasure. In the tub one evening, looking around, it struck me: this is a scene that I could paint. ‘Could’ became ‘should’ became ‘would’. To paint such a scene as the one that extended before me and all around me, I would need to conceive of painting in a special way – I needed to think of painting as a total 360-degree panorama. So, this is how I began. As a painter.

A viewer ‘entered’ the scene, literally, by poking his/her head up through a hole in the bottom. The viewer, I hoped, would be entranced: the scene inside the tub inside the small bathroom, with a functioning lightbulb, over the sink. I was on fire – creating three-dimensional paintings over the next half dozen years. They became smaller in size, as I learned techniques to paint a representation of a scene, at a smaller scale, that a viewer ‘read’ as a larger scene, farther in space. (In hindsight, I see my artworks as non-photographic forerunners of the 3-D goggles prevalent today to create virtual reality experience.) My smaller artworks were attached by a rope to a pulley, so the artwork was suspended, hovering in midair. A counterweight attached to the rope, extending from a second nearby pulley, so the entire artwork was effortlessly raised and lowered, to suit any viewer’s height.

Craig McDaniel, A Drive in the Country, acrylic on wood, with 2 pulleys and counterweight, 1982

As I began my journey as a visual artist – making those suspended three-dimensional paintings – I returned to my passion for poetry. The ‘boxes’ took me there: by surrounding the viewer’s head, by immersing the gallery goer in a visual experience in which all sight lines become part of the art, the art thrusts the viewer into a role. Into the hint of a narrative. Incorporating soundtracks on an endless loop, as an extension of the art experience, I provided ‘words’ that orchestrated a narrative, or poem, unfolding. A viewer donned a headset prior to ‘entering’ the artwork. Imagery + words. Even, occasionally, some music!

The hovering three-dimensional paintings succeeded, wildly by all accounts, in offering gallery visitors a memorable experience. Here, they got to touch the art. By lifting and lowering the art overhead, they entered the artwork; they literally became part of the art, which encompassed their vision. This, however, describes only half the equation. Their bodies, from neck down, functioned as a (surprising) sculptural presence which were seen by other gallery goers, while the viewer whose head was inside my art looked at the artwork’s panoramic interior.

Exhibit, 1981 Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati

3. An Interview with Myself

Does a great painting require refined technique?

The novelist Jess Walter said in a recent interview, “writers sometimes fall in love with this idea of ‘the gorgeous sentence’ and it becomes their only definition of writing.” The same can, and should, be said about painters. If the shapeliness of a refined brushstroke – or the zenith of representational subtlety – is all we’re after, the French Academic painters would never have been, or need to be, toppled. (Who can outdo Bouguereau?) My focus places a higher premium on gorgeous color relationships rather than hyper-realistic illustration.

Craig McDaniel, Evening Dream, 2020, acrylic on canvas. Private collection.

If you could hang any three paintings on your walls for a year, which artists would you choose?

A painting by Julie Mehretu; and a Persian miniature (most likely something from the classical tradition in Rajput painting). I know! I know! You’re thinking: “what do these artworks have to do with my own work?” But that’s just the point. To surround oneself with varied visual influences, that’s a wonderful stimulus. Am I over my limit? No? Then let me have a landscape by Marsden Hartley.

Who would you cite as strong influences on your painting practice?

There are painters, for sure, but a powerful impact on my approach – coupling the ordinary with the extraordinary – can be traced back to poets. A whole army of 20th century poets, like George Seferis, James Tate, Sylvia Plath. Plus, contemporary poets far too many to name. What have I learned? Here I’ll borrow from poet Matthew Zapruder, who offers this testimony of how he too found inspiration from the example of James Tate: “I learned . . . to follow the totally free movement of the imagination as manifest in the material of language.” This is a key insight Tate’s writing models, for me as a painter – how you follow your own trains of thought, wherever painting a painting takes you.

Going further and probing deeper, my own personal idiosyncrasies have had a large effect on why I make the art I make. It’s in my nature: it was natural when I was fifteen or sixteen years old to devote oodles amount of time experimenting with hypnosis, telepathy, telekinesis and other forms of parapsychology. The marvelous exists alongside the everyday. I’ve found this always to be true.

O.k. Let’s end this with a chance for you to name drop: name one or two artists you enjoyed being with as part of a conversation?

Sitting in his apartment in Manhattan, Saul Steinberg mentioned that he could see thought bubbles extending from my wife Jean’s head, and who can argue with him on that?

Craig McDaniel, No Regrets, 66” (H) x 32” (W), acrylic on canvas. Private Collection.

4. Narrative Paintings

I start with a blank canvas. The first marks I make with the brush is the beginning of a face (very often) a figure (often) or a place (less often) or an object (only rarely). I watch my hand moving, see an image forming; my mind releases, I’m daydreaming. Who is this? Where is she/he/they? What are they doing? I work swiftly, covering large expanses of canvas with a wide wet brush (maybe a filbert). A few hours later, and an early ‘draft’ of a composition appears, covering the entire canvas. To tell the truth, I often marvel at what I’ve concocted, and the bold colorful patterns are a delight (to my eye). A few more days working on the canvas, and, typically, the painting will have been brought to its first level of ‘finish.’ I often put that painting aside – for a few days, or perhaps a few weeks – and then look again. Having been away from the imagery allows a fresh encounter. Something, inevitably, looks awry. I see some aspect of the whole – perhaps only a detail – that, looking closely, I find myself thinking, “I could change that . . .”, and, therein, the next stage begins. I am always bold: changing a color; enlarging a doorway; adding another figure, or making one disappear. Before you can say “Hieronymous Bosch”, the painting, which once seemed complete, now stands against the wall (or easel), and looks incomplete, unfinished, maybe a mishmash of visual relationships. There may be too many competing patterns; I recognize the perspective is inconsistent to a degree that looks unhinged.

Onward I go, changing more and more. And more. A few days, a week, a few weeks later, and the painting reaches a new ‘finished’ state. This painting bears some resemblance to the earlier version, but it is decisively different. The process continues. As a rule, the larger the scale, the more versions are layered one above the other. I find it baffling that art critics often point to Cézanne as an example of unparalleled persistence: he might have worked on a canvas for months, and he returned to the same motif multiple times. I worked on the same six large paintings for over thirty years. What’s the rush?

It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop. – Confucius

Craig McDaniel, The End of Summer, acrylic on canvas, 64” (H) x 102” (W), 1990 – 2021. Private collection.

As I paint, I allow portions of earlier versions to ‘peak’ through, to enrich the surface; doing so, the colors take on a greater degree of complexity. Form becomes content; content is form. The strategy in the studio: to work intensely, in a (day)dreamlike state, and yet retain in the final product a simultaneous impression of both density and flair. The painting takes on a quality that is hard to pin down; like it was produced very (very) slowly and yet rapidly, both speeds intermingling endlessly. In fact, what is mesmerizing for me is that some versions require enormous reserves of patience. (And warm clothing – since my studio is frigid in the long Indiana winters.) Other versions seem to take shape almost magically (which still feels unexpected, even for a quasi-magical realist painter). I function, then, with non-dual awareness; the mind and body are melded into a continuous zone of being. In this state, I move beyond mindfulness; move behind watching my hand move the brush as imagery appears. Now, I am within the imagery. It exists. It is. As naturally as riding on the slipstream of a dream.

This is one of many earlier versions of the painting Spring Blossoms, illustrated earlier. In this version, the time of year is summery. This version contains some of the numbers of a large clock that gave even earlier versions explicit reference to the theme of the passage of time. A remnant of the phrase “Once upon [a time]” appears in the lower right.

The major changes inevitably involve reconsidering color relationships; and with the changes (a pink becomes mauve, or chartreuse, or yellow) the emotional quality of the painting shifts. Something that may seem minor – repositioning an arm – may then require, like dominos cascading, a major overhaul that involves recalibrations of the entire composition; changes in composition shape how the theme may move into a new line of inquiry, now carried on the new tide of textures, colors, shapes. The painting changes mood.

Craig McDaniel, Euridyce and Orpheus (Garden of Eden), oil and acrylic on canvas, 68” (H) x 108” (W). Private collection.

As stated, I start with a blank canvas. But not a blank mind. And the process I’m describing – of working on a painting over numerous, sometimes innumerable, painting sessions – can be infused with a type of openness to experimentation that I imagine a research scientist finds fascinating. For instance, Euridyce and Orpheus (Garden of Eden) – reproduced above – is a triptych (a three-part painting). The panels can be rearranged to form fresh views – painting as cinema – new ‘moments’ in a story. I developed the painting Euridyce and Orpheus (Garden of Eden), for example, alongside a deep dive I conducted into the art of Henri Rousseau. This led to a lengthy analysis of his achievement, especially in his masterful The Dream. Diagramming the flow of rhythmic lines of force that create a network, a forcefield of visual relationships, that extend across the entire canvas, linking every element of the teeming composition, revealed a discovery: the breathtaking relationship between Rousseau’s art and the art of Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli! Just one pair of diagrams may give you a glimpse into the thinking process I followed.

Diagram of Rousseau’s composition in The Dream

Diagram of composition for Botticelli’s La Primavera.

In the studio, my aim is to produce paintings that are characterized by four primary qualities: beauty, poignancy, surprise, and wit. And freedom. Painting a painting is an act of freedom. The influences of history and art history and one’s present era contribute and effect what happens. (Of course, I am a product of social forces; of course, I operate with inherited culture-bound beliefs about morality and reality.) Ultimately, however, I like to think, I like to think I’m more than a flesh-and-blood AI robot. These paintings are made by a human painter alone in a room. Without irony. And you? How should you live your life?

Craig McDaniel, Zen Archery, Acrylic on canvas, 68” (H) x 54” (W). Private collection.

Craig McDaniel is co-author of Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 (Oxford University Press, 5th edition, 2022) with translations into Korean and Chinese. His essays, art and experimental writing have appeared widely in journals, including New England Review, Art Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Red Noise Collective, Midwest Review and DIAGRAM. A new essay on painting is forthcoming in On the Seawall.