PLAYING THROUGH
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"Red, White & Blue Pin"
Billy McCarroll, "Red, White & Blue Pin," acrylic on canvas, 2001, 36" X 36". PHOTO: COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART COLLECTION, PHOTOS BY JANE EDMUNDSON.
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"Slant Series No. 2"
Billy McCarroll, "Slant Series No. 2," lacquer and acrylic on canvas, 1980, 30" X 30". PHOTO: COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART COLLECTION, PHOTOS BY JANE EDMUNDSON.
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"Tape Composition #1 (Turn Around)"
Billy McCarroll, "Tape Composition #1 (Turn Around)," acrylic on Plexiglas, 1993, 36" X 36". PHOTO: COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART COLLECTION, PHOTOS BY JANE EDMUNDSON.
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"History Lesson"
Billy McCarroll, "History Lesson," oil and mixed media on canvas, 1989, 105" X 68". PHOTO: COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART COLLECTION, PHOTOS BY JANE EDMUNDSON.
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"Slant II Black in Orange"
Billy McCarroll, "Slant II Black in Orange," acrylic on board, 2010, 30" X 30". PHOTO: COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART COLLECTION, PHOTOS BY JANE EDMUNDSON.
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Billy McCarroll and Jeffrey Spalding
Billy McCarroll and Jeffrey Spalding, who is writing for the catalogue for McCarroll’s SAAG show.
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"Red, White & Blue Pin"
Billy McCarroll, "Red, White & Blue Pin," acrylic on canvas, 2001, 36" X 36". PHOTO: COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE ART COLLECTION, PHOTOS BY JANE EDMUNDSON.
PLAYING THROUGH
With a 40-year survey of painting and printmaking at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge legend Billy McCarroll shows he's still in the game.
BY: Mary-Beth Laviolette
It takes a certain kind of sanity — or maybe insanity — to adopt the theme of golf as a subject matter. In the category of ‘minor’ subjects, there has always been a place in art for flowers, dogs, horses and the like, but golf? Does it even qualify? Let alone as a serious subject for someone with an M.A.? It did, at one point, for Billy McCarroll, a painter, printmaker and now Professor Emeritus at the University of Lethbridge.
This spring at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 40 years of diverse and sometimes irreverent art-making by McCarroll is on display in How to Play a Winning Game Your Natural Way: A Survey 1971-2011. It will include what are now those iconic images of player, tee and fairway. “The world of golf is used to satirize the hype and competition that turns the modern art scene into no more than a game,” said one reviewer. That was more than 25 years ago, when the illustrations and self-help tips gleaned from a 1953 paperback edition of pro golfer Sam Snead’s how-to, Natural Golf: How to Play a Winning Game YOUR Natural Way, set the artist on a new creative adventure.
If Sam Snead is an unknown relic to a younger audience today, they still might recognize something familiar in his presentation — his perennially tilted fedora, and retro-stylish links attire. The golfing legend was no sluff, in life, or in McCarroll’s artwork.
But, as the artist reminds me, context is everything — explaining that when his golf-themed works surfaced in 1983, Neo-Expressionism and its brasher painting styles were dominating the headlines of the art world. Provoked by the shift from abstraction to a more edgy and expressive figurative art, McCarroll wondered “how can we make an angst-ridden painting in a place like Alberta?” He made his tongue-in-cheek response in one work, The Blast Out — a clever acrylic-and-sand on canvas with the tense-looking Snead explosively hitting a ball from a sand trap. “I always thought I was walking a thin edge because I was making art about a certain kind of painting rather than about golfing.”
As his appropriation of the book’s line-drawn illustrations progressed, the artist began to see parallels between a game he knew well as a young competitive player and the foibles of everyday life. More personal and reflective subject matter also came into play. In one gorgeous oil and oil stick on canvas, a golf tee looms as high and as large as the water-tower the artist has painted beside it — water towers of the kind McCarroll had seen in communities all over the prairies.
The SAAG exhibition also recognizes McCarroll’s work as a teacher, first-time director of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, and founder of what would become one of the country’s most significant university art collections. Even at the age of 73, the lanky artist has not really pulled back. He’s making new art, and getting out and about in Lethbridge and elsewhere. “He is very present. He comes to all the openings and events and talks to everyone. As a person, MacCarroll is very open,” says Ryan Doherty, SAAG curator and organizer of the exhibition.
Joan Stebbins, now retired as SAAG’s long-time curator — and a former student of McCarroll’s — describes his artistic contribution as “intelligent painting”. Art made by someone who is serious about their work, but who doesn’t take himself all that seriously. It’s a fine distinction, but speaking with Stebbins, we couldn’t help but think about how McCarroll’s art is informed by a keen awareness of 20th century painting, leavened with a wry sense of humour.
A painting, a print, a work on paper is never just a ‘Billy McCarroll’ — without some kind of double-edged reference to different movements of the last century, from cubism to pop, hard-edge abstraction, minimalism and conceptual art. “He knows it, he’s taught it and he’s lived it,” comments Doherty who, as well, acknowledges McCarroll’s sense of pure colour and paint-handling.
Once a native of southern California and now a long-time native of an energetic contemporary art mecca based in ‘LA’ (Lethbridge, Alberta), it was in 1971, that McCarroll committed what could be construed as another act of ‘insanity’. Far from the LA he knew as a kid, he moved to Canada to teach in a fledgling art department still housed in a community college barn. In his first printmaking class, there were only three students. When as an art instructor, determined to show students examples of current Canadian and American art, McCarroll took charge of an annual budget of $600 and a 20-by-30-foot room and established the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, a collection that now encompasses more than 13,000 works of Canadian and international art. “It was about survival. I always felt students should be able to look at good art,” he reflects.
Jeffrey Spalding, who became the gallery’s first full-time director in 1981 and is an admirer of what he calls “the infectious good fun” behind McCarroll’s work, sums-up his colleague’s broader impact this way: “He had the uncanny knack for cajoling other artists to relocate; join in the action to support the cause at Lethbridge...Not only did he paint the prospects as plausible, his actions made it downright attractive, believable as well as deliverable.”
At the moment, the artist doesn’t mind poking a little fun at himself by titling a recent exhibition in Calgary Backwards is Sometimes Forward. Meaning, in his return to abstract painting, McCarroll is happy to say “this trip backwards does seem to be going forward.” With the golf clubs back in the storage locker, he’s re-investigating ideas once used to create a body of eccentric geometric abstractions from the late 1970s. Inspired by a particular brand of conceptual painting honed by Garry Neill Kennedy, Eric Cameron and Spalding at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, it’s all about adopting, as McCarroll explains, a simple but disciplined painting procedure, sticking with it and seeing where it takes you. As far as creating an abstract work, the artist admits he “could never really splash things around on the canvas”, and besides, as a devoted jazz musician, he is more emphatic with ideas expressed within a set structure, the same way music is created.
In these paint-layered new works — some possessing the surface smoothness and sheen of a ceramic tile — etched lines, small hints of a grid and areas of bold colour renew his links to artists of the 1960s and 70s, like American minimalists Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold. The process is labour-intensive: layers of paint wet-sanded or rubbed away, uncovering evidence of their making. For McCarroll, it’s a refreshing pursuit, engaged as he now is with just the primal basics behind making a work of art.
In the newly renovated Southern Alberta Art Gallery which only reopened last September, all three galleries will be deployed for the 40-year survey. It will be a first for SAAG to be filled from top to bottom with the works of one artist. Included will be the backwards-to-go-forward paintings, a selection of geometric abstracts from the 1970s and the metaphor-rich paintings, prints and works on paper from his golf period. It’s a picture of McCarroll as an artist, teacher and, together with the energies and enthusiasms of others, a ‘builder’ of a western Canadian art community.
How to Play a Winning Game Your Natural Way: A Survey 1971 - 2011 is on at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery from March 12 to May 1, 2011.
Southern Alberta Art Gallery
601 3 Avenue S, Lethbridge, Alberta T1J 0H4
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