Legends The legend series evokes archetypical myths buried beneath an avalanche of information the modern world hurls at us, forgotten, remembered, and forgotten again. View now

Surprise Packages McGrath’s newest series of work, Surprise Packages, represents a highly evolved stage of the techniques he has been developing for years. An original palette of colors and a formal ingenuity elevates text and texture to a striking and prominent role. The Surprise Package works on multiple levels. It is meant to celebrate the creative process and the joy of finding new combinations of color, texture and meaning in paintings. Yet there is also a more sinister aspect to the packages; they can’t help but reference the warning messages about packages left in airports, train stations or at any event where there is a large crowd. The surprise package also is a simple compositional device, a square in the middle of the painting on which to hang color and balance the composition. In this series, McGrath, as in the past, uses advertisements from silver age comic books as a background. This undergirding serves to balance the structure of the painting, then when the surprise package itself is painted on top of the image is tightens the weave and merges abstract-expressionism and pop together. This weaving combined with the rich interplay of printed surfaces and brush strokes, gives the pieces a rich quality that transcends typical painting in both look and effect. View now

Cross Sections The cross sections represent a different viewpoint; they are paintings from nature, but not nature seen naturally or by the naked eye. In order to see things up close, under microscopes we generally have to slice some section off thereby altering or destroying it in order to examine it. This is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that all painters who attempt to capture reality learn. The obsessive nature of the paintings reveals something of our desperation for exactitude. The images demand contemplation in a similar way to how scientists examine their subject matter. As the reference material for the work is a cross section of a worm, there is also a phoenix-like aspect to the paintings. The myth of the phoenix, a bird that burns in flame and is reborn anew to live again is similar to folk tales about worms cut in half growing back. View now

Bockscar Bockscar, sometimes called Bock's Car or Bocks Car, is the name of the United States Army Air Forces B-29 bomber that dropped the "Fat Man" nuclear weapon over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, the second atomic weapon used against Japan. The name painted on the aircraft after the mission is a pun on "boxcar" after the name of its aircraft commander, Captain Frederick C. Bock. The nose art on the plane featured a boxcar with wings. It has come to represent a container of our creativity which can be used to create beautiful things or terribly destructive purposes. On an odd note, Bockscar was flown on that day by the crew of another B-29, The Great Artiste, and was commanded by Major Charles W. Sweeney. View now

Ashes to ashes Human beings emerge attached to their mothers by an umbilical cord, and the attachment must be broken in order for the new born baby to become an individual, separate from its mother. Though human beings are born of flesh the bigger picture is also true as evidenced in the words spoken at many grave side services, “We commit it this body to the ground ; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; ----". Carl Sagan famously said, "We are made of star-stuff." Life on Earth was made possible by the death of stars. Atoms like carbon and oxygen were expelled in the last few dying gasps of stars after their final supplies of hydrogen fuel were used up. How this star-stuff came together to form life is still a mystery today. The universal mother and our individual mother’s are united in this images that depicts the circle of life in single line. The end of that line is painted with ashes and tied with a string to show our fragile touching of this universal process, our individuality and our creativity. View now

Anatomy There is evidence of the worm iconography buried beneath layers of paint, but the diagram images are more concerned a vain attempt to bring order to the chaos visible below the multi-layered surface. The worm diagram splashed on the surface in a graffiti-like manner is an attempt to label the subject matter thereby taking it into a more clinical objective realm. Labeling is one way we attempt to assert our authority over nature. But despite our best efforts a diagram can never capture the complexity of the real; it remains a flat graphic image on the surface in contrast to the more true to life image obscured below layers of paint. The worm below the surface is a reminder that some mystery will always remain. View now

1000 Faces Just as in comic books each super hero is only a minimal alteration of the basic archetype; the hero in each painting shares the same fundamental structure, a generic character from a silver age comic book. The comic book vocabulary offers the perfect vehicle to use to depict the vast pantheon of mythological heroes; comics are the continuing translation of ancient mythology. The clunky manifestation of the hero with thick black outline colored with benday dots shows how little difference there is between heroes and calls to mind Joseph Campbell’s theory that important myths from around the world which have survived for thousands of years all share a fundamental structure, which Campbell called the monomyth. View now

Man out of Mac The comic-strip narrative structure of the ad, “The insult that made a man out of Mac,” parallels the archetypical comic-book story, the superhero origin. The target audience is adolescent males who are insecure in their masculinity and who see the Atlas Dynamic-Tension method as a way to improve self-confidence, another common theme of the superhero comics. The ad entreats men not to be left behind and constructs a simple have/have not scheme in which the girl is the prize; women exist merely to reinforce a man's self-perception. Granted, Mac works hard to achieve his goal (presumably what goes on before the “LATER” banner transition), but the message is clearly that all problems can be solved with violence. View now

Test Your Talent On these canvasses worms crawl through the history of drawing. However, it is not drawing from art history proper; the subjects are a cross section of American icons from “Test Your Talent” advertisements that appeared in comic books in the 1960’s. View now

Pages in between The text formerly visible beneath the iconic worms is replaced by advertisements from old comic books. In the comic books the advertisements are the pages between the stories; they interrupt the story as well as support it. They represent the commercial transaction that was necessary in order to be able to make the comic books, the tangible containers for the highly imaginative tales. In a way they are the foundation upon which the comic book was built on. The worms now view the foundation for storytelling and imagination vs. historical events. View now

Worms Some recent paintings feature iconic worms emblazoned like graffiti on layers of paint and text that reference mankind’s greatest achievements, both mythical and historical. Just as archeologists have a modern day perspective on the history they attempt to reconstruct by excavating the remains of human activity, worms too, have a unique perspective. Simple creatures become powerful icons of witnessing all that man has ever created. View now

Three Wisemen After visiting the baby Jesus, the three wisemen had some very strange adventures. View now

Satellite Imagery In an attempt to understand the world and the universe, we often send satellites into space. They are extensions of us sent to where we cannot go to collect data on subjects that astound our imaginations. Although satellites usually float in space, very far away from the subject matter they have been built to study, they often produce composite imagery that must be stitched together to make a complete picture, due to the vast scale of the subject matter. When an image is constructed in this format, it necessarily references the scientific nature of satellite imaging. The implied purpose for such pictures is scientific study, an attempt to quantify and to define the subject matter. The image, words, and notation of measurement and direction are components used to enhance (or alter) the meaning of the image. However, while the nature of collecting the data may be unbiased, the interpretation, display and labeling of the data, is must pass through the all too fallible filter of the scientist or in this case, the artist. The images have been corrupted by overlying more personal images, and the text has been altered with religious or non-scientific explanations of the world and its history. The artist/scientist attempts to define and quantify a blending of personal and universal mythology that is impossible to elucidate. The content is also at odds with the nature of painting; this type of information is generally not acceptable subject matter for painting. It forces the viewer to try to reconcile the two disparate information types, and to become aware that the discourse of science can never be totally separated for the creative discourse of art. View now

Doorways Because, the doors stand without any architectural surroundings, they become icons, invested with possibility. Doorways are powerful symbols. They suggest containment, or the possibility of passing through. They hide what lies behind, known or unknown, good or bad. They may protect or trap. Writing on the door, using it as a tablet, adds further complication to the iconography, and serves to connect it to a specific setting, an resonate with a unique meaning. The doorways series originates with the ten plagues in Egypt. The blood of the lamb placed over the doorway to protect the Hebrews left an indelible mark on the collective consciousness of humanity. View now

Alchemy Alchemy was an imaginary art which aimed to transmute the baser metals into gold, to find the universal remedy for diseases that led the way to modern chemistry. Alchemy is the miraculous power of transmuting something common into something precious. Headboards and common items are transformed into iconic altarpieces with gold leaf and imagery that reference childhood, religion and the monsters that existed in that imaginary world under the bed. View now

The Alphabet In the alphabet series the artist battles the hero. The hero must be overcome in order to resolve the image. A generic comic book hero head is pasted in the center of the canvas, as the starting point for each image. A further constraint is that the image must contain one letter of the alphabet. The letters are the beginning of text, or the most basic textual element. Text is added to the format in a painterly way; it augments, rather than defines. The addition of ambiguous narrative (cobbled together from biblical sources, art criticism, comic books, postmodern dissertations, and religious pamphlets) gives the viewer a further element from which meaning can be derived. The "meaning" is at the intersection of the elements, similar to a comic book panel, in which, the meaning is created by a combination of visuals and words. View now

Limbo Limbo is an indeterminate state of being. It is waiting without end, a transition or a state of confinement. It is equated with the Christian purgatory - torture, penance, hell on earth, or place of the dead. It is a region where certain classes of souls are supposed to await judgment. In Roman Catholic theology, Limbo is located on the border of Hell. View now

Other work A selection of other work, that didn't quite fit into a gallery or from a series of older work not displayed in the galleries. Themes of cataclysm, iconography, and science vs. religion and faith are prevalent throughout. View now