BILL McCARROLL: British Columbia, June 3 - 10, 2005, Jennifer Kostuik Gallery, Vancouver

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"Icon X"

Bill McCarroll, "Icon X," 2001, acrylic and collage on canvas, 72" x 24" x 3".

BILL McCARROLL

BRITISH COLUMBIA: June 3 - 10

Jennifer Kostuik Gallery, Vancouver

By Beverly Cramp

When Bill McCarroll discovered a 1950s golf manual in 1983, it changed the direction of his artwork. “I liked one of the pictures and started to appropriate golfing images,” says the California-educated artist whose work has evolved from oil paint abstractions to large, Pop-art-influenced acrylics. Based in Lethbridge, Alberta, McCarroll is himself a passionate golfer, but that is not why golf images became his central theme. He uses golf is a metaphor for the angst, tension and stress of contemporary life. The golf imagery took McCarroll into the iconicized world of Pop art. “I appropriate the images and treat them lavishly,” he says. “But my (golf pictures) are reductive, simplistic images. The colour is flat and bright.” One of McCarroll’s large canvases is called Icon X and it is the image of a golf tee. “It’s phallic in a way. It’s this big juicy tee, five feet tall. There’s abstraction here too, by reducing things down to a simple design concept.” McCarroll’s June show features a series of smaller, hand-coloured prints as well as several of his acrylic paintings.

Represented by: Jennifer Kostuik Gallery, Vancouver; Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary.