profile: Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Since 2012, Kevin McNamee-Tweed has been delighting the Austin arts community with his humorous exhibits. His first show, Rocks, won the Austin Critics Table award for best solo exhibition that year. Rocks featured faux-caveman drawings on stone, a collection of silly moments and pop culture send-ups filtered through a prehistoric lens. Their humor worked on a variety of levels: One rock featured a boy riding a square-wheeled bicycle, another had a man’s face with the phrase “Self portrait with burden of modernity” written on his forehead. A mix of the silly and the scatological, the idiot and the intellectual combined to create a truly funny, warm-hearted, and broadly enjoyable exhibit.
Two years later, Co-Lab Projects hosted Books, a collection of drawings that showcased the literary side of McNamee-Tweed’s wit. These simple and occasionally sloppy pictures of books demonstrated the same inspired humor as his earlier exhibit. Titles like What Plants Do When You Leave the Room and It’s Only Your Fault: How to Self Help Yourself proved that McNamee-Tweed’s humor extended beyond the image. Words followed in 2015, which saw the artist’s use of language boiled down to its most basic elements: letters and words, and how the former make up (and break up, and humorously distort) the latter. Fittingly, Books and Words were later compiled into actual books.
Recently, McNamee-Tweed has shifted gears. In June he unveiled 100 Views, an exhibit that consisted of one image: the moon reflecting off a lake, repeated over the course of 25 pieces. A month later, he presented Bread in North Carolina Butter in Tennessee at the To__Bridges__ gallery in the Bronx, showcasing a series of sunsets and idyllic landscapes scattered throughout pristine white rooms. Gone were the sly, absurdist humor and laugh-out-loud wordplay that are his trademarks. His new paintings lack text entirely, but they radiate with familiar warmth. He may have traded obvious grins for subtle smiles, but McNamee-Tweed’s new work rewards the pleasure center in the same thoughtful, clever, and slightly mischievous way as before.
Epoch Coffee sits at the edge of Austin’s North Loop neighborhood, a 24-hour shop that’s always crammed with students and old-Austin eccentrics; members of the two groups frequently square off in games of four-way chess. I find McNamee-Tweed seated at a center table, a space he could have only procured with his mysterious charm. He looks like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, giving off California vibes with his mop-top and scruff. Although he grew up in North Carolina, he was born in his father’s dorm room at Stanford with the help of a midwife (his mother, coincidentally, is a doula).
“I’m Californian in some ways,” he tells me, “but I could not feel more alien when I’m there.” Spend a little bit of time with the artist and you will quickly see why. McNamee-Tweed is reserved and often seems somewhat discontent; he speaks with the stilted cadence of a man who spends a lot of time lost in thought. He may paint pictures of sunsets, but it’s hard to imagine him relaxing on the beach in front of one.
On the table, his notebook sits open to a funny drawing of a quail with a happy face in place of the bird’s normal facial features—a McNamee-Tweed staple. Next to it is a copy of Bridget Riley’s Collected Writings. The Op-art artist seems like a strange inspiration, but his mentors are not the figures I expect them to be.
“In terms of artists I take instructional inspiration from, I look at Japanese prints probably more than anything else,” he explains. “Milton Avery and Alex Katz are touchstones… Charles Burchfield’s light is just nuts. Etel Adnan is fun in a serious way”—a sentiment that feels applicable to McNamee-Tweed’s own work—“and Lois Dodd and Fairfield Porter are go-tos in my recent research.”
Each of these artists uses color in striking ways to create paintings that capture the natural beauty of a landscape or a portrait, but infuses them with a vibrancy that moves beyond typical representational painting. Such artists seem like obvious parallels to McNamee-Tweed’s recent work, but similarities would have been difficult to discern when viewing his earlier exhibits. In moving from “fun in a fun way” toward “fun in a serious way,” McNamee-Tweed’s aesthetic heritage has become more readily apparent.
“I think I was tired of making funny things a little bit,” he confesses. “But I was just interested in different things in different ways. Color became a super important thing for me, a different reality… It increasingly became a way of making sense and articulating personal experience.”
This is not an abstract explanation. McNamee-Tweed suffered from what he dubs a “mysterious health crisis” a year and a half ago. “I was sitting and eating lunch,” he explains, “and I lost consciousness. I was just sitting there and blacked out. Almost fell out of the chair completely, caught myself, came back, and had a recollection of the experience—I could still remember what it felt like to not have my senses actively determining my perception. I could still feel what that void of senses felt like, and the implications were super profound. It was really fascinating and beautiful. It was almost euphoric.”
The sensation was short-lived. Nausea kicked in—“nausea that was so intense that it felt like it was in my muscles”—and this and other ailments would plague him for nearly a year. In response, McNamee-Tweed overhauled his lifestyle, kicking beer, avoiding certain foods, and generally adjusting in the way that one suffering from Crohn’s or any number of autoimmune disorders would. In time, the symptoms lessened.
“I feel that I’m exiting it,” he tells me. “I’m making sense of it… It’s like I get to choose how I live, and limit myself… It offers clarity to the whole thing.” His limitations aren’t strictly dietary. Like a mutant form of synesthesia, color has become intertwined with his physical well-being, his paintings regulations for self-improvement.
“In the past several months, I have come to look at my relationship with color as this system of making sense of all this,” he explains. “My relationship with canvas and the pigments I use held for me a genuine piety where humor really didn’t feel necessary. Humor is a great ally in the drudgery of human experience, but beauty has been a better friend lately.”
Installation shot of Bread in North Carolina Butter in Tennessee at the To__Bridges__ gallery (2016). Image courtesy The Still House Group.
Materials play a large role in McNamee-Tweed’s decision-making process. Rocks was born of its source material, and the shape of the rocks often influenced the content of the images. Words was created using sumi ink on Rives BFK Tan paper, and the monochromatic palette drew attention to the most basic elements of the work: the spacing and placement of individual letters on the page. His first work with canvas was for an exhibit called Sherts and Dreams, a small display at Las Cruxes, a local boutique. He stretched canvas into shapes of clothing and peppered them with playful imitations of Nike and Polo logos, juxtaposed against abstract bands of color. It was not his most inspired exhibit, but it led to an important discovery.
“The stuff that became Sherts and Dreams, which I now think of as “quiet paintings,” are just super austere and geometric, Color Field kind of things that have nothing to say. They just are there; they have colors that you can have relationships with, and formal and compositional decisions that your brain can make metaphors out of or whatever, but…” He trails off, as if he’d already said too much.
The idea of having “nothing to say” permeates his latest work. In the booklet accompanying the 100 Views exhibit, he wrote, “I’d like to let this imagery stretch out, repeat, become redundant, transcend into meditation, go further into lunacy, and ultimately, in the most ideal scenario, create some vacancy in the mind of the viewer. If even the tiniest void of thought and articulation can be achieved by experiencing these repeating paintings then this show is a success.”
This is an odd statement, given the artist’s heady brand of humor and love of language, but the sentiment feels appropriate coming from a former philosophy student. Breaching the void is an intellectual endeavor, a meditated attempt at approaching the sublime. He recalls visiting Agnes Martin’s Dia:Beacon exhibit in Beacon, New York, and feeling overwhelmed. “I closed my eyes and put my head down, because it was too much to look at them right away,” he says. (In The New York Times, critic Holland Cotter wrote that Martin’s paintings “have to be seen ‘live’ to make their effect. In reproduction they tend to look like nothing.”)
“I have no idea what my paintings do for people, and I don’t equate my paintings to any such divination, but there is, in my assessment, emotional availability in the imagery and the color and the technique and the material of my work,” McNamee-Tweed says. “It’s there. It can be befriended, ignored easily, looked through, whatever. I hope [my paintings] have some of that sublime vacancy that Agnes Martin’s work harnesses so profoundly.”
One could argue that McNamee-Tweed’s earlier work, and the sheer joy that it evoked, came closer to approximating the sublime than his new paintings do. Although there is something to be said for the live effect of seeing the same image repeated in various forms and colors, over and over, as if driven by a supernatural vision, the feeling is muted by cliché. A sun shimmering over a lake is the visual definition of serene. With his choice of subject matter, McNamee-Tweed continues to play tricks on his audience, inviting viewers to lose themselves in endlessly repeating squiggles of sea. How can we take seriously his call for transcendence when presented with its most vacant and obvious representation? By choosing such a hollow signifier, however, McNamee-Tweed effectively short-circuits the intellectual process, giving us no other interpretation of the material and prodding us toward the desired frame of mind. With typical charm and magic, he manages to subvert his own aims, accomplishing both serious meditation and a humorous send-up of such meditation in the same stroke.
In addition to his exhibits in Austin and New York, McNamee-Tweed recently showcased work at the Menil Collection Bookstore in Houston. For a one-night-only exhibit on July 8, he displayed more than 40 handmade books collected from as early as 2008, when he thought of himself not as an artist but a writer. The books included DIY zines, “pirated literary collections,” and pieces made from cloth, paper, and other materials. Content ranged from short stories to abstract designs, spanning the entirety of his shift away from the written word.
The beginnings of McNamee-Tweed’s current style can be traced back through his earlier pieces in glimpses and snippets. Tree branches and flowers pop up throughout, often as backdrops but occasionally as standalone pieces that most directly prefigure his recent work. When the surprise wears off, 100 Views and Bread in North Carolina Butter in Tennessee come to feel like natural extensions of his oeuvre, displays of absurdity that have transcended language and humor and transmogrified into sincere attempts at beauty. He begins each piece with a set of only three or four colors, a watercolor-gouache mix of paint that he then applies to his canvases in delicate layers, to preserve transparency. “It really becomes mucky and ugly when you have three layers,” he confesses. He adds squares and other geometric figures to “anchor the predominant palette or balance the composition—or to throw things off a bit,” he says. “I love how barbaric a gesture it is to insert a hard square in a loosely rendered nature scene.”
Nature has held prominent influence in McNamee-Tweed’s artistic career. In 2005, as a student at NYU, he studied abroad in Italy. “They have a beautiful campus there,” he tells me. “It’s on a villa—it’s like literally the most beautiful thing I’ve seen with my own eyes.” He had recently switched majors from philosophy to anthropology, but he wasn’t sure that’s what he wanted to study, either. He took a drawing course for fun.
“My class would sit out in the fucking olive orchard and draw,” he recalls with a mix of nostalgia and disbelief. Next thing he knew, he “randomly got a job offer at an art supply store,” and his interest in the subject grew. When he returned to the U.S., he switched majors again, ultimately receiving a BFA in studio art.
McNamee-Tweed will soon find himself surrounded by beauty once again. He will spend time in Colorado “working in an adobe hut situated in an apple orchard at the foot of the San Juan Mountains,” he tells me, in the small town of Saguache. Alex DeCarli and Adrienne Garbini run an artists’ retreat there called The Range. Then, in September, he will travel to the northeastern Nevada desert as part of a fellowship with the Montello Foundation.
“It’s on 80 untouched acres of desert, with zero humans, no wi-fi, and no cell phones,” he explains. “It’s actual isolation. It will be a totally new definition of quiet.”
So can we expect a new set of “quiet paintings” to go along with it?
“It might go really, really quiet,” McNamee-Tweed tells me, his voice softening. “Or it could be that my own thoughts become amplified and I make very busy work… I don’t know what’ll happen.” He pauses, contemplating the fear that he anticipates with a touch of excitement. “But I expect the sky to be a really great thing,” he says finally. “It’s in the fifth percentile of light pollutants in the United States.”
Profile by Sean Redmond.
Photography by Don Corr.