Bare Bones

Joshua McDonald
Seattle Contemporary Artist

Empty Archways, deep shadows, textured walls from the passage of time--created in a contemporary way.

Josh Mcdonald and I have been friends since college. We worked in the campus gallery together, critiqued each others art, and had our senior shows together. Needless to say, I understood his college work.

McDonalds work four years ago depicted carefully painted  mountain scenes colliding with structural straight lines that had a man made feel. They questioned the connections between man-made structures and the natural world, and not necessarily in a negative way. He sees beauty in everything, but is never afraid to ask questions and ponder connections.

I, myself, had been pondering his current abstract works and their meaning for a while. Then on a drive through Eastern Oregon, I found myself staring at empty, abandoned buildings sitting on large expanses of land. Forgotten, their layers of scratched paint and bare bones stood stark against the desert backdrop. The deep shadows from the low sun became shapes of their own. Time had taken all but their geometry, and yet they remained; stoic and proud.

Like Jasper Johns creating empty towns, Josh is creating empty structures. Spaces we could view as flat at first. However, once  you look closer, the viewer is invited to enter into this world he’s created. His pieces feel like they used to hold more at one time, just like the structures did. Now we’re only seeing the bare lines, what has stood the test of time, what has been left behind. The imprints of structures. The imprints of memories.

He paints with strong blacks and whites, and occasional pastels that remind me of the Central Oregon desert landscape where he spent his childhood. The repeating patterns feel like a cycle, of building, leaving behind, moving on. Not all the lines touch, leaving us to fill in where they might have been connected, might have had more to them. The physical build-up of paint that is then scraped away on his panels reflect the addition of paint layers over time on a wooden wall, only to be scraped away by wind and rain. They add a tangible, physicality to his pieces as well, as if they themselves are structures lost to time.

I think we have a hard time understanding, well, time. Our lives are short in comparison to the world. The passing of time is a mystery to us, how it moves so slowly at times and so quickly at others, how it seems to speed up as we get older. Memories become less full with the passing, but  they hold their outlines, their main structure against the flow. These works remind me of time itself, passing and moving and unstoppable as ever.

Josh is still making me think about the connection between man-made structures and the land, and all the meaning they hold for us.