Robert McNown

As an undergraduate at the University of Kansas in the late 1960s, there were two major influences running through the painting department: from the West Coast there was the painterly figuration of Richard Diebenkorn, and from the East Coast the powerful presence of Willem deKooning. While McNown made a brief attempt at the deKooning-type gestural painting he soon realized that kind of expression did not feel right to him.

For many years he continued to work on, predominantly drawings, which were driven by relentlessly logical compositional strategies along with painstakingly time consuming modes of execution. Throughout these years he worked his way through many different mediums, some rather unconventional. Whether pencil, crayons, rubber stamps, shoe polish, ink, paint among others, all were intrinsic to what the image would end up looking like. Increasingly, the artist came to realize he could stop chasing deKooning’s gestural line and would work to develop his own “McNown line”.