Serious and Not-So-Serious: 14 Questions With Xanda McCagg
IdeelArt
At IdeelArt, we believe an artist's story is told both inside and outside the studio. In this series, we pose 14 questions that bridge creative vision and everyday life, mixing professional insight with the personal details that make each artist unique.
Today, we meet Xanda McCagg, an American abstract artist who lives and works in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood. For Xanda, painting is a language of connection. Through form, gesture and color, she explores human behavior and the layered complexity of experience, bringing the rhythms of music and movement into her studio practice.
Press
Meet Xanda McCagg
Bold Journey Magazine
We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Xanda McCagg. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Xanda.
Lyman Allyn showcases abstract work by Xanda McCagg
The Day, Connecticut News
“In her recent work, the artist has drawn from impressions from her travels and from looking back through art history as a way of making sense of the present. Based in Chelsea, in New York City, McCagg has maintained a studio for the past 25 years, and she has exhibited her work in individual and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad.”
Jaquelyn Tuerk, Professor of Art History, Kean University
“Xanda McCagg's mixed media paintings appeal to the human scale, measuring as large as five feet or as small as five inches, inviting close observation and intimacy. McCagg combines bright and vibrant thick paint with thin washes of muted and fleshy earth tones, the juxtaposition of which excites emotion. Luminous yellows and golds glow from the inside, and saturated mauves shine like encaustic. Stained glass luminosity quivers just below the surface.”
Xanda McCagg: Encounters
Michael J. Bowen, Standpipe Gallery, 2011
“The commercial and competitive aspects of the contemporary art market have inspired a great deal of innovation, but also a considerable amount of self-promoting fiddle-faddle and empty experimentation.
It is most refreshing, therefore, to find that the aesthetic and humanist valences of classical modernism still hold a meaningful place in the work of established artists, whose sensibilities required a more personal engagement with the quiddities of image-making.”
Artist in Profile: Xanda McCagg
Jordana Zeldin, Art Bridge Installations, LLC, New York, New York, August 2009
“Xanda McCagg (pronounced zan-da) sites her fascination with “human experience” as the driving force in her work. “I’m interested in how things shift,” she begins. “If I’m standing over there, versus if I come up to you and touch you.” She walks over to me and brushes up against my arm. That she incorporated movement into her explanation makes perfect sense. Her canvases, many of them human-size, project a similar sense of motion - quick, energetic lines, bright colors bumping up against one another (as opposed to sitting passively side by side) give us a sense that something is happening, that interactions are taking place between the various forms and textures. It brings to mind haiku, the distillation of a complex idea into three carefully crafted lines.”