40 Watercolor artist | DECEMBER 2019
shapes does the sculpture hold within it—piercing it,
opening, curving—everything that isn’t sculpture. Th at
became really natural for me.” McCormack’s “Th ree River
Series” successfully demonstrates this key technique in the
artist’s work, as compositions of strings and rocks are bro-
ken up into diptychs or triptychs—the white space around
the elements appearing as a subject in and of itself.Including the Personal
Aside from the printer blunder, McCormack’s process
tends to be a little more intentional. At some point he real-
ized that the process was surely as interesting as the end
result, and so his “Th eories Series” was born. Th ese paint-
ings present to the viewer a piece of work that appears to
be in progress. Th e ongoing evolution of the work is the
visual intrigue. “Th is is when the paintings became a littlemore trompe l’oeil feeling,” says McCormack, “in the sense
of my trying to fool the eye.” For instance, it appears as
though tape, paper, corrugated cardboard and sticky notes
are popping out from the surface of the works, but in
reality, they’re created with paint like the rest of the piece.
“I don’t want to be as obvious as trompe l’oeil paintings.
I want that sense of reality where you question what’s real
and what’s not real. Is that really masking tape left on
there, or is it painted?”
Chaos Th eory and the Treachery of Images (pages 34–35)
has all of these elements, and even a mock palette painted
to one side. One of the sticky notes to the left side says, in
French, “Th is is not a collage,” which is a reference (as is
the title) to Rene Magritte’s Treachery of Images, the artist’s
famous painting of a pipe. Th e fi rst part of the title, how-
ever, is a little more personal, and refl ects McCormack’s
tendency to include stories within his works that viewers
may or may not pick up on. “In child-
hood, I had maybe 10 episodes over a
six- or seven-year period when I closed
my eyes and had a vision where every-
thing I could see was chaotic—masses
of trash or paper, things just moving,”
says McCormack. “It was very disturb-
ing.” Even if the viewer can’t under-
stand every last nuance of a work, the
artist believes his paintings aren’t com-
plete until they’ve been seen by another
person. “One of the most rewarding
things about being an artist isn’t win-
ning prizes and getting money,” he says,
“but fi nding yourself standing behind
two people talking to each other about
your painting.”Balancing Act
McCormack’s “Shadow Series” is his
most abstract, with few representational
elements, although the rings included in
each were fi rst constructed from real
paper to create a shadow that the artist
could replicate with paint. Each of these
takes his typical two-dimensional back-
ground to a new level, with three colorLEFT
Learning to Walk in My
Own Shadow 2 (watercolor
and acrylic on paper,
24x18)OPPOSITE TOP
Learning to Walk in My
Own Shadow 16
(watercolor and acrylic on
paper, 24x18)