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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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Connie McClure's move to Florida means a sale of her
varied art this weekend.
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Connie McClure, at the age of 3, put her finger to the steamed-over window in her mother's kitchen and drew a line. And then another. Beads of water ran down, making more lines. "I still remember the joy of it," says McClure, in the studio she shares at 1113 Cross Lane, Walnut Hills, surrounded by paintings, drawings, etchings, frescos -- yes, frescos -- that speak of much of a lifetime shaped by the joy of making art.
A studio sale of her works -- perhaps the artistic equivalent of a yard sale but far removed from the detritus of your closets or mine -- will take place this weekend. This is great good luck for anyone who has ever thought of owning a McClure. Those who haven't thought of doing so are missing a pleasure of the first level.
McClure communicates her joy in art through her works and also imparted that pleasure to hundreds of art students in nearly three decades of teaching at the Art Academy and elsewhere. Tall and slender, she has a fine-boned, expressive face surrounded by short, springy, lightly graying hair. Cincinnati is about to lose the continued presence of this familiar member of the art community. She is moving to Florida to be nearer to family, but will maintain the Cincinnati studio for return visits. There are still commissions to fulfill. Like anyone moving house, McClure doesn't want to take everything. Hence, the sale.
The range is as wide-reaching as the interests of this intensely curious, always experimenting artist who found herself at odds with the currents of the art world she studied in. "Everything was abstract expressionist then, and I wasn't interested in that," she says. She cares passionately about materials, how they can be manipulated, how put to most effective use, how one thing works upon another, how artists of other times employed their materials.
"I love process," she says. "I love the craft of the Old Masters. The history of materials is fascinating. For me, reading about pigments is recreational, almost religious." Any new way to do something is an immediate challenge to McClure, prompting her to be the faculty member initiating computer art at the Art Academy in the 1980s. Today's sophisticated computers make her early computer images in the sale "ancient history."
To talk with McClure about art is to learn how to carry off trompe l'oeil (shallow space, actual size, no living being, hung so that light comes from the same angle as in the painting); to learn what happens when silver, gold and copper point are all used in a single drawing (they look the same at first, but silver darkens, copper turns green, gold stays the same); and why she sometimes mixes wax with oil (produces a thin, transparent color).
McClure, who draws with elegant precision, learned traditional ways on the sly from the art world of her student days, teaching herself about egg tempera, which predates oil paints, about encaustic (dried pigment added to melted beeswax, used by ancient Greeks and Romans), and how to draw in metal point against a prepared surface.
Fresco, however, "is the only medium that must be taught by others. It's so labor intensive and so challenging. I have only awe for early artists using it. The color is laid on and must set before more is added, but there is a five-hour frame before the plaster dries -- well, it's pretty fantastic." In 1990, on sabbatical, she went to Maine to the only school then teaching fresco, and in 1991 an exhibition of her fresco portraits of people at work (a bus driver, shoe repairman, librarian, lawyer, banker, hair dresser and others formed a diverse lot) appeared at the Arts Consortium. Some of these works are in the studio sale, along with other frescos that are small still lifes, landscapes and figures.
Sale prices range from $5 for little drawings she calls "gesture sketches," each dashed off in a matter of a couple of minutes or even less, to $8,000 for a daring, dramatic cluster of eight canvases hung together close as puzzle pieces with uneven outer edges, in a glorious turmoil of figures and draperies that allowed her to explore skin tones against eight colors -- each canvas has drapery of a different hue.
There are fossil drawings from a show she did for the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1975. There are watercolors including scenes of Mount Adams. There are drawings of clouds and drawings of people. Some of the watercolors are on little 5-by-7 cards she can hold in her hand and work on anywhere. "Gold Star Chili parlor," she says, showing me one. "For practice." The cloud drawings may remind people with long memories of her spectacular pencil drawing of clouds on an 18-foot stretch of canvas that appeared at the Contem-porary Arts Center in 1973.
"I've always been criticized for not focusing. I love large and love small. I like the figure, but I also like minimal drawing. And I'm forever editing my work," she says.
With her quick spontaneity and unaffected love of art, McClure has been a living example to all her students, but especially to women who need to know how to be an artist, a woman, a person with a family. We are fortunate she has persevered. The works for sale in her studio speak to her dedication but more importantly to her talent.
Those who criticize Connie McClure's lack of focus miss the point: She is always focused, but the object of her focus changes.
STUDIO ART SALE by Connie McClure happens on Saturday (10 a.m.-7 p.m.) and Sunday (1-5 p.m.) at 1113 Cross Lane in Walnut Hills. Info: 513-861-7027.
