The Art of Dan McClannen

BLAM!

2010-12-13T08:49:00.001-08:00

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24"x20.5" Acrylic, spray paint, airbrush on stretched canvas. In simple black frame

Bushy Poo

2010-09-13T22:33:00.001-07:00

Who is this man??

2010-08-18T12:42:00.001-07:00

Memento Mori

2010-08-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

Pyramidal Abstraction

2010-08-12T13:06:00.001-07:00

Old-ish Piece

2010-08-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

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An older cubist-inspired work. I'm posting it now because I never did before and it's an early ancestor of the kind of work I've been doing lately. It's about a year and a half old.

About 3"x5"

Collage

2010-08-06T00:04:00.000-07:00

5"x7", Framed

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Jungle

2010-08-04T12:38:00.001-07:00

No Hay Banda @ Hunter's

2010-08-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

New Paintings

2009-12-30T01:45:00.001-08:00

8"x11" Acrylic and Spraypaint, Unframed

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Acrylic and spraypaint on canvas 8" x 11"

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Back in the saddle

2009-12-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

My latest creation. Acrylic on paper. 19"x27"

Notes from underground

2009-05-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

Or from the undergallery if you will. Some random and unedited thoughts from my notebook I'm keeping as I make new work for my upcoming show (Shameless plug.. June 19th, Lala Gallery, 609 Main St.):

"Fit your parts into one another and build up your figure as a carpenter does a house. Everything must be constructed - built up of parts that make a unit: a tree like a human body, a human body like a cathedral." -Matisse

What can be art

What art can be

"...one of the fundamental points about Cubism is this: not only did we try to displace reality. Reality was in the painting... We always had the idea that we were realists, but in the sense of the Chinese who said 'I don't imitate nature; I work like her'. "

Just because you don't know where you're going, doesn't mean you won't end up somewhere.

"The painter is revealed to be the true subject of the painting, for it is on him that the psychic as well as physical pressure of space is exerted, rather than leading out in the opposite direction. As Matisse says, 'It is the tremor of the individual that counts, rather than the object which produced the emotion'." -Picasso

I've been doing work from imagination that at points and for fleeting moments becomes real and representational to me. Typically I'm amused by that acknowledgment of some thing I see, a face, an animal or something like that. But I resist pursuing a close visual representation of that thing. Think for a moment about the form of a cloud as it blows by, unbearably slow, but constant. For a few moments, a minute or so, your mind recognizes, in the masses of clouds, a face. And sometimes the friend next to you can't see it, no matter how much you point and gesture in the air, making graceful drawing marks on the sky with your hand. And by this point the clouds have moved on. The face melts and distorts and finally is gone. It only looked like that one thing to you from your exact perspective for that few moments in time that will not and cannot ever happen again.

This is how I've worked on the paintings for this show. I create forms from my mind; just colors and shapes that are floating around in my head (like clouds). Then my mind sees something it recognizes from it's visual repertoire and as I'm making the marks, I begin to make them as if I were painting that thing; rigid architectural lines, rounded arabesque muscle like forms, plant life, birds. But before the image becomes a literal representation of that object, I try to obscure it. Let the form be what it is, not project that "reality" on it. Leave the ambiguity there so that the viewer can also have those moments of discovery that I delight in so much as I work. What I "see in the clouds" so to speak as I'm working tells me something about myself, and it's my hope that the viewer then learns something about themselves as well.

"I believe the work of art to be the product of calculation, but such calculations are often unknown to the author himself... Or one should presume, as Rimbaud said, that in us it is the other who calculates." -Picasso

A korf is a tiger.

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." -Albert Einstein

Sketchbook back cover

2009-02-09T22:52:00.001-08:00

Hmm..

2009-01-30T01:27:00.001-08:00

5"x7" Ink and watercolor on paper, unframed

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A totally unworthy Joan Miro impression and some sort of other worldly pumpkin patch?

Holy Hiatus Batman!

2009-01-09T02:23:00.000-08:00

Foggy

2008-12-12T02:04:00.001-08:00

King Friday

2008-12-09T13:38:00.001-08:00

winner

Composition

2008-11-22T22:58:00.000-08:00

B&W acrylic and collage. I'd like to do a mural quite similar to this, like 12x30 feet

Brave New World

2008-11-18T00:16:00.000-08:00

Some words of wisdom from Aldous Huxley. The first paragraph and a half of his foreward to Brave New World. I wish I'd read this and taken it to heart a couple years ago.

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behavior. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one's middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth -- all this is surely vain and futile. ..."

Abstractions of late

2008-11-17T11:28:00.000-08:00

All small abstractions, none of them bigger than about 7 or 8 inches on the longest side.

?

2008-11-13T13:15:00.000-08:00

My Wallet - A constant work in progress

2008-11-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

Fliers and Posters

2008-11-12T00:13:00.001-08:00

Pretty self-explanatory.. The last three were from shows by or with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. A crazed Elvis Costello fan stole two large expensive prints right off the window of a packed lobby on opening night. Flattering and frustrating at the same time.

MAC D MAC!

2008-11-11T23:01:00.000-08:00

Perm. markers, ballpoint pen, yellow ink, and whiteout on a cardboard box.

"They call me Mac Rapalicious and when I bubble I blow trouble up in your ear."
Last Call, Outkast

Moving forward/Looking back

2008-11-11T02:33:00.000-08:00

Cheese alert... It seems appropriate in starting something new like this to take a moment and look back at how I got where I am now. That said, here are a whole bunch of images from the last couple years that I think have led, for better or for worse, to where I am now with my art. Trust me I'm as confused as you are.

12"x6", Ink, watercolor, spraypaint, on paper, unframed

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7.5"x9" Ink, watercolor, on paper, unframed

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Richard Nixon

Isaac Asimov

Bill Monroe

"Well I think I gotta go somewhere, but I don't rightly know just when
Not even sure what's gonna go down or if I'm comin back again
And I may not do much of anything and we both know where that's at,
Cause I won't know why I even go til after I get back" -John Hartford

Why am I doing this?

2008-11-11T02:19:00.000-08:00

This blog is intended to act as a more current and organic alternative to a regular portfolio website. It will be a place where I can post current work, work in progress, ideas about future work, and so on and whatnot, etc... Rather than uploading a "greatest hits" collection of my favorite "current" work every six months to a year, I can post frequently and unreservedly everything of any significance that I create and HOPEFULLY in doing so create some kind of a chronology and develop a better understanding of myself, my work, and our progression together. If this seems self-serving and egocentric to you, I agree. People like you and I should probably stop reading and just look at the pretty pictures...