Shane McClatchey painting residency / Noah clothing t-shirts / Drink and Draw event / Exhibitions
Photos - David Andre
'Overloaded with light, color, and speed, feeling the shape of the ground with my feet and my eyes, both the board and the paintbrush asking the same question: how can the line be drawn? How should a line be drawn? What makes a shape beautiful? In Life Drawing class I talk a lot about line quality as it relates to the gesture - fast and slow, lightness and heaviness, soft vs sharp. Rhythm is important. Drawing our way down the mountain gave me a new perspective on what a pencil is for. In the end, the more I worked on this painting, the lines disappeared. The viewer decides the perfect line to draw their way down, a little different each time.
This series was born out of a two week residency at Turbulence Concept, a creative hub in the center of Meribel, high up in the French Alps.
The interaction of light and shadow on the surface of snow told me a lot about what I see but also how I see it. The collision of light and shadow describes form in a way that allows us to navigate. Whether it’s with a paintbrush or a snowboard, looking at the peaks in the distance or the ground rushing below my feet, we need shadows to define the light and light to define the shadows. As much as the mountain is an ocean of frozen waves to carve into pieces with a board or skis, it is a playground of light and color, compressed values and stretched edges to cut into shapes and lines with a paintbrush. Chasing Geoffroy down the mountain and tracing his lines was one of the best lessons in drawing that I never got at art school.
It was a transformative two weeks of painting up on the mountain and snowboarding back down. The wonderful crew from Turbulence and the people I met affected the work as much as the snow we stood on. Also the food (that was my first art show with a fondue setup and hopefully not the last). My new French friends are legendary. Quick story: Hughes is in the painting below with the orange skis, he helped me get my paintings down the mountain one evening. We were both carrying paintings, I had never ridden down with a wet oil painting before so I was being pretty conservative and every time I looked over at him he was either skiing backwards or flying through the air upside down, or both (skieur numéro un des Les 3 Vallées) with artwork in his hands. Turbulence (read in your best French accent) is one part performance, two parts style. I’m grateful to everyone in Meribel and also in Laguna who helped make this all happen and would have been impossible without. These beautiful photos were taken by David André.
Traveling tells us so much about ourselves. Paintings and people are defined by their context and woven out of circumstance and I’m so glad to have been put on top of a mountain with an easel. Our clothes still stink with fondue. These pieces are available through both Turbulence Concept in Meribel and Kennedy Contemporary in Newport Beach.
Merci beaucoup!' - Shane McClatchey
