Page 12 - Art First: Kate McCrickard: New Romantics

kate mccrickard new romantics

‘In my paintings I avoid depth of field and look for the balance of an animated line
drawn in paint that works like a lariat around and through passages of tone. I often
think of Bonnard and his images of people who aren’t really doing anything. Mine
are active, but his dictum that it is not a matter of painting life, but a matter of giving
life to painting–is one I hold dear.’

McCrickard’s New Romantics bring us a world of post-pandemic realities in which
her urban subjects in the cafés and bars of Belleville–her quartier in Paris–emerge
from the isolation and strangeness of lockdown in search of love, company, or
family reunions. Always observed from life in a flow of fugitive drawings, the partici -
pants enter a realm of the imagination in the studio, where anything can happen.
And it does!

The compositions each have a rich cultural lineage, for McCrickard is an art historian
who writes for scholarly journals about Renaissance to contemporary print-making,
and she borrows and steals both consciously and subconsciously from those she
admires or happens to be looking at. In her studio you will find books ranging from
Vanessa Bell, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Max Beckmann, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, and Éduard Vuillard to Jacopo da Pontormo’s Man ner -
ist paintings, and Francisco Goya’s etchings. There are numerous sketch books filled
with café regulars, her drinkers, propping up the zinc, street girls, Punks, Goths lurk -
ing on street corners, family members playing games, reading or feasting at a large
table; then there are passages sketched from Käthe Kollwitz, from Edvard Munch,
or Egon Schiele, quickly noted at an exhibition or a museum recently visited.

Hers is a fertile mind, darting deftly from busy mornings getting her three young
children off to school or late afternoon sessions on increasingly demanding home -
work and rigorous preparation for exams, to concentrated hours in her studio,

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