A Weekend With...DeLoss... 05/31/2016

Huffington Post Arts and Culture

A review of one of our favorite artists, DeLoss McGraw, at the exhibition of his new work "As With A Picture, So With a Poem" at a well known Los Angeles gallery just appeared in the Huffington Post by Edward Goldman, art critic.  He writes:

"...A new exhibition at Couturier Gallery of works by painter, poet, and illustrator, DeLoss McGraw, evokes the memory of his award winning illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. In this exhibition of works on paper, DeLoss quotes from his poems and journals, with references to his childhood, his relationship with his mother, and the influence of music in his life and work.

The palette in this new body of works —with DeLoss’ trademark silhouettes of children and animals —is more restricted than usual, but somehow the overall effect is even more dramatic. It’s always a mystery for me how this artist is able to combine in one work both a sense of innocence and sophistication..."

We have a number of works in this series by the artist in our gallery, click here to see them.

To give a little background of how we happen to be carrying DeLoss McGraw's work, the following might be of interest:  In the mid 80's, when I directed a gallery in San Francisco, an artist came in the door, unannounced, with a portfolio of gouache paintings on paper.  He said that he was represented by another gallery but that they had only placed them in a bin, and that he had sold nothing.  Mentioning that he had recently quite his teaching job at the University of San Diego to paint full time he wondered if I would be interested.  I said "let's take a look."  So we spread them out on the floor to see what he was doing.  It was a jaw dropping moment when I saw all these wonderful pieces and I offered him a show on the spot, a show that sold out later that year.  After that show and another I took his work to the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland and got him shows in London, Munich and Barcelona.  His career has continued with shows in major galleries in New York, Los Angeles and across the country, and has been collected by important collections like The Metropolitan Museum, Harvard University, and the Bodleian Collection of Oxford University in England among many others.