MacDonald’s ‘Home:’ Suburban Legends
Review by Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post, Weekend section, May 22, 2002
In his artist's statement for "Home," a solo show by Kevin MacDonald at David Adamson Gallery, the painter quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who defines beauty as "nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure."
There's something of that sense of gorgeous dread in this exhibition of MacDonald's recent work, which mines rich emotive ore from the metaphoric mother lode of suburbia. Suburban Washington, to be precise, or Silver Spring, to be even more exact. That's where MacDonald grew up (full disclosure: so did I), and the feeling of affection mixed with disquiet throbs in every one of his uncanny house portraits, three of which depict homes MacDonald at one time lived in.
With deadpan titles like "Ranch," "Cape Cod," "Split Level" and "Colonial," or even the more tongue-in-cheek "Suburban Apotheosis," the paintings and prints strive for a kind of universality that belies the obvious specificity of their closely observed details. They are both the idea of a house and the representation of someone's physical home, an idea not so subtly suggested by the knowing double entendre of MacDonald's "House and Home."
Although the artist compares the idealized manner in which he renders these homes (and one self-service laundry, Hyattsville's "Dream Clean") to that of British landscape painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, MacDonald's work is both tidier than Turner's yet less fussy than Constable's. His houses -- mostly painted in cleanly lined watercolor, with occasional washes of ink, acrylic, coffee and tea -- have the etiolated look of bleached bones. There is an antique sensibility, as though these kinds of structures were quaint or obsolete, something meant for museum study.
MacDonald's gaze is superficially closer to that of the scientist than the romantic. Although the works in "Home" can have the spare, reductive look of a geometrician's notebook, it is in the contrast between MacDonald's blank facades and the spooky bushes and darkly brooding backgrounds that one plugs into the kind of terrible beauty that Rilke was talking about.