38 Watercolor artist | DECEMBER 2019
Design With Shadows + Space
Shadows from strings that are strung across various forms
have almost become McCormack’s calling card in the fi ne
art world. Th ese themes span his many series and bridge
the gap between abstraction and representation that’s
present in nearly every one of the artist’s works. “Th e
shadow that falls on a rock cast by a string tells you the
contour of the rock almost more than all the modeling and
molding you do to paint the objects,” he says. “If you take
an elliptical shape and put a line across it, the shadow cast
from that string onto the ellipsis will tell you how it’s
curved. How the shadow falls across the rock tells you
where the string is in relationship to the rock, but it also
tells you the contours of the object’s surface.”
Th ese principles are no more evident than in McCormack’s
“Th eories Series” and his “Th ree River Series,” both of
which rely on the graphic compositions resulting from
the combination of rocks and
strings in three-dimensional
space. Th e compositions are usu-
ally done spur-of-the-moment,as McCormack draws them out directly on the page—with
one exception. Years ago, the artist had a happy technolog-
ical accident. “I stumbled upon a composition when I was
printing a painting with my inkjet printer,” he says. “Th e
printer jammed up a third of the way through, and I just
pulled the paper out so there was a third of the painting
showing. I turned the paper around and set it in from the
other end of the paper.” Th is happened again for the mid-
dle component, so that he ended up with a painting that
was broken up into three distinct sections with white space
in the middle. “It was probably one of my more successful
pieces for getting recognition. It was in quite a few shows.”
Th is painting inspired the triptych format of the “Th ree
River Series,” including Red Twig (below).
White space is commonly included in McCormack’s
works, and the artist believes it’s important to consider
the negative space in a painting as its own unique sub-
ject—a belief he attributes to his work in sculpture. “Most
painters don’t learn the importance of negative space,” he
says. “If you look at a piece of sculpture, what kind ofRed Twig (watercolor
on paper, 22x30)
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