A cautionary figure for painter Robert McCauley is 19th-century British explorer John Franklin, whose search for the Northwest Passage ended when his ships got stuck in the ice–and rather than learn how to survive from the natives, the men starved. “If you go into nature with a sense that you’re better than the people already there or the animals or the flora,” McCauley says, “you’re going to be in for trouble.”
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McCauley’s 14 paintings of animals and people at Perimeter rely at times on various art historical sources, but he says he never wanted to have his own distinctive style, “where someone says, ‘Look at the brushwork–I know who did that.’ I was more invested in content.” He often copies the human figures from earlier portraits while his soft, supple landscapes refer to 19th-century romantic painting. Transparent glazes–a technique first used in the early Renaissance for portraits and religious images–give his colors great delicacy and ennoble the animals and humans alike.
“I think you spend all your life trying to find the right form for the content you have within you,” McCauley says. Exploring Chicago for the first time in 1972, he discovered “a totally different world” from rural Washington. He saw a Hairy Who exhibit and his first housing projects and switched from the Rauschenberg-inspired mixed-media works he’d been doing to large drawings of human figures and of high-rises whose facades suggested faces. Later he incorporated animals.
Where: Perimeter, 210 W. Superior
