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.