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Doug Meyer is an artist and teaches art
at Mount St Mary's College
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On a green bluff high above the Pacific Ocean’s edge Camey McGilvray is chopping wood. In her dazzling white studio this pioneer of contemporary sculpture begins her daily chores in the service of her art: drawing, painting gluing, screwing, pounding, and, above all, cutting. She cuts with a skill saw, a jig saw, a band saw, a chop saw and a table saw. She skillfully wields the handsaws and carving tools passed on from her father and grandfather to create her unique abstract shapes. Even her large metal sculptures, cut using an industrial laser process, have McGilvray’s distinctive feel for reductive form.
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The varied shapes that come to life through Mcgilvray’s craftsmanship are but one step in her creative process that ends with colorful high relief and freestanding sculptures. She begins with crisp line drawings that play rigorous geometries against elegant interlocking curves. These form the patterns that are cut into wood and metal. Assembling these complex shapes requires a network of screws, pegs, and supports hidden artfully from the viewer. Once completed the work is gessoed, viewed from all angles, and fine-tuned to insure the complete transformation from raw material to integrated illusion. The final phase of McGilvray’s process is the painting. Each shape is assigned a unifying color of high intensity and painted with luminous oils. Many of her shapes have a subtle shaded modeling at the edges, reminiscent of the analytic cubism of Picasso and Braque, but with a much more highly chromatic palette coming from the age of Pop.
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Just as the nature of reality was questioned by the abstract artists of the early 20th century, McGilvray challenges the contemporary viewer with the subtle play of the literal and the illusionistic. Her painted shapes form intricate three-dimensional compositions created by wood thickness, angles of placement, and cast shadows. The interplay of color can reinforce or contradict its dimensionality, requiring the interaction of the viewer to determine “what is real.” McGilvray approaches this retinal exercise with a characteristic playfulness. She teases us into making a decision for ourselves as to what exactly it is we are seeing. We are seduced by the play of light and shadow and color, but the real reward comes with the visual revelation of figures, landscapes, a broken heart, and many more images that reveal themselves to us.
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