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It’s a show about nothing.
“Be Cool!,” Seth McBride’s first one-man exhibition of oil paintings, primarily depicting mundane objects and everyday people engaged in very ordinary activities, is intriguing in spite of itself.
People lounge on beach chairs, wade into the water, stare at computer screens and iPhones, smoke cigarettes outside a social club, wait for the T at a Boston subway station, sit in congested traffic, play pool, and make a bank deposit or withdrawal. Granted, the guy doing business at the bank was inexplicably shirtless but the activity itself is unremarkable.
There are a few paintings of empty lawn chairs, one of McBride’s black cat (Reggie) climbing into his shower stall, another of an old-school boxy Zenith television set, and one of a skier in a mid-air jump, powdery snow all about him. And there is a wonderfully bizarre painting of a seagull, its legs not where they’re supposed to be.
He is a 37-year-old self-taught artist. He took a ceramics class in high school and while he considered it fun, it didn’t ignite any serious interest in the medium. After working in the spirits and hospitality industry, he became a middle school paraprofessional, recently receiving a visual arts teaching license. He and Gabrielle, his wife of three years, (and Reggie) live in New Bedford.
McBride is inspired by graffiti, underground music, urban environments, tattooing, European prints and posters, film noir, ancient history, 1940s aesthetics and watching people in public spaces. He was born in 1989, the same year that “Seinfeld” debuted on NBC. But when he was a boy, he and his brother watched reruns of “Seinfeld” with their grandfather every night after dinner. He became obsessed with it.
While not in the exhibition (but accessible at sethmcbride.com), there are three paintings depicting his versions of classic “Seinfeld” moments, including Elaine’s jerky and erratic dance moves, George Costanza eating a donut that he found in the kitchen trash can at an apartment party, and the iconic Soup Nazi angrily shouting “No soup for you!” But even the paintings in “Be Cool!” — while not riffing on the old sitcom — have something Seinfeldian about them. Stay tuned.
I met with McBride at the Groundwork Art Space shortly before the formal opening on June 20 and after I eyeballed everything for a second time, we walked around together and talked about almost every painting. Without being too didactic, I mildly busted his chops about the fingers in some paintings looking like sausages and told him to take heart. I know any number of visual artists with advanced degrees and nearly 50 years experience who still struggle with it. And I am no exception. But that’s a minor quibble. Much of the work is outstanding.
“Beach Day” features a couple, perhaps in their 60s, sitting in their respective beach chairs, on a great expanse of tan. The sand is rightly reduced to a color field without any unnecessary detail. The focus is on the pair. The man, with sunglasses and a baseball cap on, reads a book. The woman sleeps. She is quite tanned and the skirt-like bottom of her swimsuit rests high enough on her thigh to reveal a lighter hue, where the sun has not touched. It is a small but significant detail, revealing an optical sensibility on McBride’s part that even a more experienced painter may not have registered. The almost black shadows below the chairs lock it down.
“Wading Out” shares some similarities with “Beach Day.” Again, an older couple against a large field of color. This time it’s a deep aqueous blue as they wade out into the cold water. The woman wears a one-piece black and pink patterned swimsuit that is almost op-art itself. The man’s most distinguishing figure is an ear, looking like a black letter C. It shouldn’t work but it does.
McBride exhibits several paintings that home in on certain details of ordinary things. “Pool Shark” makes the most of that familiar green tabletop. A pool stick is positioned to strike the cue ball, and it’s convincing enough to hear the strike. “Yapping Away” focuses on an old-school rotary telephone and a notepad on an end table. A woman stretches the cord as she talks and only her forearm and hand are visible, red fingernail polish and a diamond ring become key visual elements.
The vintage “Television in Orange” and the purple and blue “Lawn Chair” are odes to the everyday, even if the everyday were yesterday.
“Seinfeld” was famously a “show about nothing.” But in reality, it was about everything. It was about the complexities of friendship and family, about social mores, and it was about pride, envy, greed, lust, sloth, gluttony and anger and Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer had the seven deadly sins down pat.
“Be Cool!” is a show about nothing. Someone walking down the street, sleeping on the beach, talking on the phone, spending too much time looking at screens, being stuck in traffic, a seagull, a cat who wants to get in the shower, a dog looking out from the trunk of a car, and so on.
And that’s everything.
“Be Cool!” will be on display at Groundwork Art Space, 1213 Purchase St., New Bedford, through the end of July.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
