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The Paintings of Joseph McGurl:

Nature, Science, and a Bit of Magic
By CHARLES RASKOB ROBINSON

GH

T he keynote talk that opened this spring’s 30th An-

niversary Exhibition of the American Society of
Marine Artists (ASMA) was delivered by none other than
the editor of this magazine, Peter Trippi. He focused on
Americans’ growing re-engagement with representation —
dubbed by some commentators as the “New Realism” and
well exemplified by many works in the ASMA exhibition.
Trippi cited four characteristics he associates with this trend:
the connectedness of art today with art of the past; beauty,
not in the sense of what is pretty, but what is profoundly
aesthetic; nature and our relationship with it; and finally a
trait shared by all great artworks, the capacity to show view-
ers a truth important to the artist.
Joseph G. McGurl (b. 1958), who happens to be an
Artist Member of ASMA and has a work in its annual ex-
hibition, is in the vanguard of this New Realism. All of
Trippi’s points can be discerned in McGurl’s work, yet it is
the fourth of these, truth, in which McGurl has pushed the
envelope most energetically. This Massachusetts landscapist
is intrigued with the great advances of science during the
20th century, including new understandings of light, space,
and time, and has sought to apply them to the transcen-
dentalism on which American landscape painting has piv-
oted since the 19th century, especially through the Hudson
River School.

THE STUDIO OR THE SEA?

Born in Needham, Massachusetts, McGurl grew up
by the sea in nearby Quincy. His early interest in art was en-
couraged by his father, a muralist, and it grew as he attended
Saturday classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In
1980 McGurl earned a BFA from the Massachusetts College
of Art and Design, where he double-majored in painting
and education. A summer studying art in England and an-
other in Italy enhanced his enthusiasm, yet his love of the
sea prevailed when he enrolled at the Chapman School of
Seamanship in Stuart, Florida, the motto of which is “Learn
at the Helm.”

GOSNOLD
2007, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 48 IN.
TREE’S PLACE, ORLEANS, MA

FINE ART CONNOISSEUR.COM | September/October 2008 Copyright 2008 Fine Art Connoisseur. Used by Permission.
 PAINTING FROM MONHEGAN
2004, OIL ON LINEN, 24 X 30 IN.
JOHN PENCE GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO

McGurl earned further professional credentials that quali-

fied him to skipper various boats between Maine and the Caribbean
for four years. “But in my spare time,” he recalls, “I began to do
watercolors. I found they sold, and I began to wonder if one could
earn a living as a painter.” In 1986, a successful exhibition in Co-
hasset, Massachusetts, encouraged him, yet McGurl realized that
his college had not provided him with the fundamentals and dis-
cipline in drawing he needed.
Thus he studied for two years with Robert John Cormier (b.
1932), a leader of the Boston School and former student of R.H. Ives
Gammell (1893-1981), who offered a rigorous drawing program

Copyright 2008 Fine Art Connoisseur. Used by Permission. September/October 2008 | FINE ART CONNOISSEUR.COM
ICE FLOES awareness of tradition, Shaw brought out a similarly scaled Western sun-
2008, OIL ON CANVAS, 30 X 40 IN. set painted by Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). Though their subjects, mi-
HAMMER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY lieus, and prices were vastly different, these paintings shared not only a set
of tones and values, but also an almost overpowering sense of serenity.
rooted in French academic practice. Equipped with these skills, McGurl McGurl has not focused exclusively on Eastern subjects. Almost
launched his professional artistic career in 1987, painting mostly coastal a decade ago, his San Francisco dealer, John Pence, invited him to paint
scenes and landscapes in both watercolor and oil. In 1994, he, his wife Pa- and exhibit in California: “We do not have the long heritage and rela-
tricia, and their two sons moved into a converted carriage house on Am- tionship with the sea you have back East, especially in New England.
rita Island on the western shore of Cape Cod. Enjoying harbor views A fellow like McGurl who really knows the sea firsthand brings a ma-
and the opportunity to sail his 44-foot yawl whenever he wants, McGurl turity to the subject rarely seen in the West.” The resulting show was
is ideally positioned to paint images of the sea and shore. a success, and McGurl still returns to paint in California periodically.
Although the four attributes that Trippi associates with New
Realism are featured in McGurl’s early career, they have come
into sharper focus for him only in the past decade. Regarding
the growing connectedness of today’s artists with their histori-
cal forerunners, McGurl told André van de Wende in 2006 that
“I think of my art as being sort of evolutionary, really, where it
is evolving from this long line of painters [who go back] to the
Renaissance and before… It’s a progression, and you’re always
learning about those who came before you. Rather than trying
to reinvent the wheel, it’s better to take the wheel and improve
it; and you pay tribute to the painters who came before you, and
you also try to explore something new along the way.” 1
Howard Shaw of New York’s Hammer Galleries recently
stood admiring his friend’s large oil depicting the sailboat Jolly
Jane in quiet waters at sundown. Then, to underscore McGurl’s

TWILIGHT, NANTUCKET SOUND

2007, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 36 IN.
ROBERT WILSON GALLERIES, NANTUCKET

FINE ART CONNOISSEUR.COM | September/October 2008


NATURAL BEAUTY’S TIMELESS ALLURE
As for nature and beauty, McGurl says, “I cannot say whether my
love of nature has sustained me in my art, or art has deepened my love
of nature. What is true is that one could not exist without the other.
The attraction I find to the physical beauty, which is distinct from pret-
tiness, of the material world combined with its complexities and vari-
ations, has further compelled me toward its realm. It always leads to
new revelations.” Howard Shaw casts further light by noting that “In
today’s hectic world of e-mail, cell phones, and Blackberries, people
have lost the ability for sustained focus. And the idea that McGurl will
not paint a place he does not know deeply — that he will take hours
or days to get to know the scene before he paints it — is almost in-
conceivable to today’s highly time-sensitive viewer. The calm grandeur
of paintings about nature and beauty — the sublime of nature — by
THE POND, MENEMSHA
2007, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 48 IN.
HAMMER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY
TIME AND SPACE
2008, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 30 IN.
TREE’S PLACE, ORLEANS, MA
the Hudson River School artists and their 21st-century disciples in-
vites viewers to pause and have a moment of peaceful reflection.”
Among the disciples with whom McGurl worked closely during
the ’90s were Fellow ASMA Members Donald Demers and William
R. Davis. Dr. Julian Baird, who represented this trio when he owned
Tree’s Place Gallery on Cape Cod, astutely dubbed them the New Amer-
ican Luminists. Of course, the theological undertones of 19th-century
American landscape painting gave way to a secularism in the 20th cen-
tury and to images that make evident the presence of human beings.
Baird observes that, in the aftermath of this shift, McGurl has made a
“conscious decision to bridge this historical chasm and to reconnect
with the past not just in the sense of style but in the sense of retrans-
lating the philosophical goals of the past into the present possibilities
— a new definition of the sublime in the perception and depiction of
the American landscape.” 2
McGurl’s work, then, is founded on the truth of natural experi-
ence — of being in and part of nature. He describes it as “immersing
yourself in the landscape and having a personal and interactive connec-
tion with the landscape I am describing. All my senses are involved. I be-
came involved in 20th-century science in order to better understand —
or at least better appreciate — what is happening when I am so directly
absorbed in nature and what I am experiencing — light, space, move-
ment, etc. So I began to read more about the breakthroughs in physics.”
THE SCIENCE OF SEEING
Almost as if he were speaking to McGurl and other contempo-
rary artists fascinated with the General Theory of Relativity, Einstein
wrote: “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true
science.” 3 McGurl is also intrigued with Quantum Mechanics (Physics)

JOLLY JANE
2008, OIL ON CANVAS, 40 X 60 IN.
HAMMER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY
and the related Uncertainty Principle. While Relativity replaced New-
tonian physics at the macro level, Quantum Mechanics revolutionized
the micro level. Together — by proposing several dimensions of space-
time (rather than just three dimensions of space and one given time)
— these theories have transformed how we can view experience.
At best, McGurl admits, one is only able to ask more questions: “It
is a struggle for me to go beyond the literal, but it helps me better ap-
preciate all of what is happening — time, space, motion — not only all
around us but in us since we are part of it.” The leading candidate in
recent years to explain all matter and forces in the universe has been the
String Theory, in which the “point particles” of elementary physics are
replaced by small vibrating strings. Unlike many artists working today,
McGurl relishes these possibilities, and quite convincingly utters such
sentences as “I am always looking for chaos in the rhythm — as in
wave patterns.”
Wrestling with these expanding horizons has only strengthened
McGurl’s commitment to direct observation, or more theoretically,
direct absorption into the actual experience. It is hardly surprising that
McGurl considers cameras inferior to the eye (they see far less than its
multiple-per-second recordation) and photographs as filters sepa-
rating the viewer from the whole kinetic experience of the scene.
FROM FIELD TO GALLERY
Back in the studio, McGurl relies on his memory of what he has
seen in the field, and also on his data-laden field studies. Both are cru-
cial in his effort to convey on canvas the truth he has experienced. Eliz-
abeth Ives Hunter, executive director of the Cape Cod Museum of Art,
has exhibited McGurl’s paintings, and invited him to participate in
conferences that encourage the resurgence of representational art and
stimulate dialogue among those who make it. She calls McGurl “one
of the brightest lights among painters in this century in that he mar-
ries two important traditions: the Impressionist and the Academic. He
combines excellence of on-site observation and notation of those
impressions in his field studies with the real magic, namely, how he
applies his academic training to them in the studio.”
FINE ART CONNOISSEUR.COM | September/October 2008
McGurl agrees that, “While
the experience in the field is very
emotional, in the studio it is much
more an intellectual exercise of tak-
ing the field studies and my rec-
ollections of the field experience
to compose a work that expresses
all of this to the viewer. Sometimes
the final work resembles the field
study but other times that is not
the case. However it turns out, I
find that at some point in the stu-
dio process the painting takes on
a life of its own, the field studies
having served their purpose. Since
my field studies serve as notebooks
of observed information — information that can be revisited and
reused in other works in the future — I rarely sell them.”
For 15 years, Henry and Sharon Martin of Connecticut have been
assembling a considerable collection of Hudson River School art, and
more recently works by McGurl and his contemporary peers. “For me,”
Henry says,“Joe’s work has the hallmarks of great art — successfully con-
veying truth as the artist sees it, while also raising questions for the viewer
that the artist does not answer. Joe does not paint for the market but for
his own conviction, and his collectors like his work all the more for it. For
all of these reasons, a hundred years from now we believe Joe will be viewed
as one of the most important artists in the resurgence of realist art.”
McGurl has achieved a great deal in his 21-year career in large
part because his talent was recognized early and promoted through
the media, books, galleries, and museums. His ship set sail in 1987
when he became a member of the Copley Society of Boston, and quickly
was elected a Copley Master (the youngest in the history of America’s
oldest nonprofit art organization). The honors continue to accrue, but
no matter how acclaimed McGurl may become, he says that he is still
all about the work: “The process of discovery is just as important to
me as the final painting. The real joy comes from trying things, learn-
ing more about painting and making discoveries.” 4
McGurl is represented by Hammer Galleries (New York), where
his next solo exhibition will be on view October 2-25; John Pence
Gallery (San Francisco); Robert Wilson Gallery (Nantucket); and Tree’s
Place (Orleans, MA). n
CHARLES RASKOB ROBINSON is a charter member and Fellow of the American
Society of Marine Artists. His painting, Under the Scorching Sun at the Five Minute
Gun, is in the Society’s 30th Anniversary exhibition now touring the U.S.
Endnotes
1 André Van de Wende, “In Living Color: Joseph McGurl Plumbs the Deep Beauty
of Nature,” Cape Cod View, Jan/Feb 2006.
2 Julian Baird, PhD, New American Luminists Revisit the Native Landscape, exhi-
bition catalogue, Tree’s Place Gallery, Orleans, MA, 1998, p. 12.
3 Tom Crider (ed.), A Nature Lover’s Book of Quotations, Southbury, CT: Birch
Tree Publishing, 2000, p. 167.
4 M. Stephen Doherty, “Joseph McGurl: Making the Landscape Your Own,” Amer-
ican Artist, April 2002, p. 42.
Copyright 2008 Fine Art Connoisseur. Used by Permission.