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May Issue 2006
City of Charleston, SC, Features Works by William McCullough
The
City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs in Charleston, SC,
will present, William McCullough, Southern Painter: A Retrospective
Exhibition, which will be on display from May 20 through Aug.
12, 2006 at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park. The exhibition
will showcase McCullough's work from past and present and will
open in conjunction with the 2006 Piccolo Spoleto Festival.
After growing up in rural Williamsburg County, SC, McCullough
left his family farm for Manhattan to pursue a career as a professional
artist. In New York he met Robert Brachman, a former student of
Robert Henri and George Bellows. Brachman taught a direct,
non-sentimental realistic style of painting despite the fact that
representational art had been completely dismissed by the art
critics of this time. McCullough was also a frequent visitor
to the home of John Koch, a renowned representational painter
who critiqued the young artist's work and served as mentor and
friend. The artist Daniel Greene, an instructor at the Art
Student's League, was influential to McCullough's style and McCullough
worked for a time in Greene's New York Studio.
Following in the tradition of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, McCullough and his classmates created landscapes and urban interiors with figures and spaces solidly defined and classically rendered. In the words of his teacher, Robert Brachman, "Tradition must be learned, if for nothing more than to find how to break it intelligently."
In 1973, McCullough returned to the South and began painting landscapes of the Appalachian Mountains and teaching painting at the Tryon Arts Center in Tryon, NC. In the 1980s, he moved back to South Carolina and the family farm, focusing on agrarian landscape painting and shortly thereafter began working as a painting instructor at the Gibbes Studio School in Charleston. At this time the city was undergoing extensive gentrification, and McCullough used his skills of non-sentimental realism to document the vanishing urban communities. These paintings, in addition to his masterfully composed, painterly landscapes and still-lifes, augmented his reputation as one of the leading realist painters of the South. Today his work is represented in many corporate, private, and museum collections, including the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, the St. Andrews Society in New York, and Orient Express Hotels International.
In a body of work loaned from these private collections as well as the artist's own, the viewer will experience McCullough's unique viewpoint, from the farms of rural South Carolina to the studio lofts of New York City, and from the mountains of Western North Carolina to the changing urban landscape of Charleston in a visual journey through over 30 years of McCullough's professional career.
Today, McCullough divides his time between his studio above the 53 Cannon Street Gallery, in Charleston, and his farm in Kingstree, SC, and although his work is steeped in the traditions of classical realism, he remains deeply connected to culture, landscape, and traditions of the South.
For more info check our SC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the gallery at 843/958-6484 or at (www.ci.charleston.sc.us/oca.html).
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