Bud McNichol

Lives and works in Livingston, NJ

Artist statement

My paintings begin in the world, with something witnessed, remembered, or felt before language catches up. I use observation as a starting point, but rarely as an endpoint. A person, landscape, photograph, or ordinary event can become the beginning of an image that shifts between realism, expressionism, and abstraction as I work. I am interested in the point where a recognizable image begins to behave strangely. Familiar places and situations can carry psychological weight, while small details can change how an image is understood. A basketball court can become a place of vulnerability. A quiet landscape can suggest something unsettling. A seemingly ordinary scene can contain contradictions that only reveal themselves slowly. Humor and unease often exist together in my paintings. I build the paintings through looking, revising, obscuring, and discovering. I move between carefully observed passages and looser, more intuitive marks, allowing changes in direction and accidents to remain visible. Paint, drawing, glitter, found materials, raw linen, and other surfaces can enter the same image. I am interested in what happens when something carefully observed shares space with something artificial, raw, or absurd. The images often begin with a specific source, but I don't want them to remain illustrations of that source. As I work, recognizable forms are pushed, interrupted, or transformed. Visual clues accumulate, but they do not necessarily lead to a single explanation. The...

Artwork