Art Alley Reception for Dan McConnell

“Because of the current state of the world, and maybe because I’m a topical cartoonist most days of the week, I thought I would take a trip back into the process of painting large canvases in oil for my exhibit at Pybus. I’m honored to be among the artists who have shown at Pybus starting with Robert Wilson, a good friend, and abstract expressionist artist who brought so much information and art experiences to Wenatchee Valley.  This exhibit aims to express the raw emotions of war through abstract expressionism and the symbolism of how ordinary things get rendered useless and brought to their bare bones through the destruction of war. War has always been a painful topic for me…from Vietnam to the war in  Ukraine…my paintings will be metaphorical depictions of those atrocities. The car is the symbol I’ll be using to depict war’s savagery. My goal in this series of paintings is to convey the emotional impact of war through line, shape, paint application, color, and composition. I started the process with a very abstract expressionist approach to the creative art experience…just feeling the application of paint, feeling the physical action of the painting process. I approached it very freely, following image creation but doing it in a non-deliberate application of paint. Paintings convey many things, many emotions.  In this case, I will not be creating beautiful things but something raw, possibly ugly or grotesque that conveys a message. There may be beauty in the compositions and in the color applications.  My process now feels very abstract. I started in an  abstract expressionist manner but now I’m working within a more structured color field painting. Originally the act of painting was really felt in the movements of my arms and dripping, scrubbing, layering, and washing the surfaces of the canvases but now I’m going into more structure and more detail and less reckless abandon.”