Dan McCleary and Astrid Preston at Craig Krull, Santa Monica

Astrid Preston, Summer -- Asterisms of the Seasons, 2021. Oil on canvas, 42 x 42". Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery.

Dan McCleary: Still Lifes

Astrid Preston: Between Worlds

Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica

August 7 through September 11 2021

By PETER FRANK, August 2021

No genre of painting could be more anodyne than flowers, right? Perhaps, but the floral history of art brims with vigor, passion, and even fury, as we know from vanitas still lifes and expressionist bouquets. Dan McCleary and Astrid Preston are known for their intimate, transportive subjects – McCleary for his stolid figures, Preston for her delicate gardens – but they stir drama and sensuosity out of virtuosic form and technique. The two artists’ recent emphasis on flowers (coincident, but perhaps triggered by the pandemic’s social muting) focuses them both on familiar forms but not-so-familiar obsessions.  

McCleary’s focus, in fact, encompasses other still life subjects – fruit, in particular – while Preston’s attention to blooms does not treat them as natural arrangements. Both artists paint in oils, but to almost opposite effect: McCleary favors mostly muted, opaque colors (especially in his slate-gray backgrounds), while Preston devises an intoxicating array of luminous hues. Their roots are in 19^th century French painting, to be sure, but McCleary descends from the mid-century near-tactile realism of Fantin-Latour and Monticelli, and ultimately early Cézanne – not to mention the Italian gravity of Morandi – while more and more, Preston conjures Redon and the color-world of post-Impressionism even as her ties to late Monet remain evident.

Dan McCleary, Mixed Flowers with Freesias, 2021. Oil on canvas, 25 x 19". Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery.

The influence of Pacific Asian painting can also be felt in both bodies of work. The title Preston has given her show, “Between Worlds,” seems to refer to the “world” of Impressionism and that of ukiyo-e, the “floating world” of Hokusai, certainly as her downpours of petals fall into aqueous fields of mysterious, indistinct depth, her floral maelstroms marrying Redon’s pastels to Monet’s water lilies in a Japanese ceremony. How different in heft and motion are McCleary’s bunches bursting from glass vases, or his studies of single stems, or his arrangements of mangoes, plums, nectarines, and so forth, set on a level plane and swaddled in crepuscular shadow. Dusky as they are, these simple depictions, harkening back to 17^th century Spanish masters like Zurburan and Coton – and forward to McCleary’s contemporary Martha Alf – reflect all manner of available light, that in the gallery and that imagined by the painter.

For all the art-historical models they bespeak, the latest work by these two accomplished Los Angeles artists finally belong to an American artistic spirit, the “still small voice” posited against the presumptions of grandeur associated with American art (and life and land in general). Dan McCleary’s self-contained, self-possessed plants and fruits speak of a quieted, interiorized mind, while Astrid Preston’s nebulous flower showers provide a soothing, poignant caress-by-landscape. These veteran painters deal with how things look, allowing us to determine for ourselves how things feel. WM