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“Reading
Stephen McClymont”
by Deborah J. Haynes
How do we read abstraction? More to the point, how do we interpret images that are born of experience in the phenomenal and elemental world, but whose form does not readily reveal those mysteries?
Start with the surface.
Color seems to transcend or replace narrative. The subject is indigo, with
azure, emerald, vermilion, crimson, ochre, black. This colorful brilliance
becomes a narrative about space and time. Texture is scraped and stroked.
The method, obviously intuitive. The surface shimmers, breaks, catches light.
Then, associations and metaphors as a world appears. Everywhere is the great
blue and we are submerged. The paintings, taken as a whole, offer a phenomenology
of water.
Stephen McClymont’s
paintings are simultaneously epic and intimate, heroic and personal. His work
strives for the universal and does not seek to express the particularities
of personal or cultural identity. These are paintings of experience that transcend
such categories. We feel the pull toward nature, yet we are afraid of it.
We climb mountains. We, like McClymont, swim in the sea. But unlike the painter,
we do not usually give form to that luminous and mysterious world.
For nineteenth-century
painters from Frederick Church to Théodore Géricault, water
served as an “in-between” in the elements in the landscape: in between
the earth and the sky. In McClymont’s paintings, water is the medium.
Our invisible bodies are allied with water, part of the water, and filled
with water. In creating a space that seeks to express this contact with the
elemental forces of nature, we are reminded that the universe is simultaneously
matter and spirit. Merging with this boundless vastness, we know that we are
nothing. We are like specks of marble dust that coat the sea floor off the
Greek island of Paros, where old quarries no longer produce stone.
In reading these paintings,
the contemplative sublime is given form. We observe and reflect as we, too,
swim in this sea of space and time. Water is an alchemical agent, its constantly
changing character instructing us to be fluid and receptive to the flow of
things. The past with its shipwrecks and glorious achievements is as distant,
really, as the future with its technoseductive promises. Here, now, only fluidity,
only space. Only time to muse, and to be.
Jamestown, Colorado
July 2002
* Deborah J. Haynes is Chair Department of Fine Arts. Professor of Fine Arts. University of Colorado at Boulder.
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Stephen McClymont
was born in Sydney, Australia. He lived in England (London) where his family
moved when he was 9 years old. In London he spent several years with the family
of musicians, Hepzibah and Yahudi Menuhin. In 1969 Stephen McClymont entered
the National Art School in Sydney, Australia where he graduated in 1974 with
a Degree in sculpture. In the late 70s he left Sydney for New York to study
at the New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture. In New York
he met with and studied under the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell.
He also became Joan Mitchell’s assistant in New York as well as in her
country home in Vetheuil, France. Stephen McClymont left New York in 1986
for Paris with his wife and daughter, spending their summers in Greece. In
Paris he was a senior teacher of painting at the Parisian campus of Parsons
School of Design. Since January 2002 he has lived with his family in Denver,
Colorado, moving there for one year, where he accepted a senior teaching position
in the Fine Arts Department at Boulder University.
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