Loren Maclver
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LOREN MAC IVER was a woman, a notable explorer of New York City and a modern poet in paint. She was also a virtually self-taught artist, her only formal training having been a few lessons at the Art Students League when she was ten. Born in New York in 1909, married at twenty to the poet Lloyd Frankenberg, she has lived in the city ever since, although she and her husband spent ten summers during the 1930's in a driftwood shack which they built on the ocean side of Cape Cod. They had also been to Europe twice, once in 1948, again in 1953-54.
New York has inspired artists in many ways. To the futurists it was a soaring triumph of the machine age; to the social realists it was a grim or picturesque drama of human events. But to MacIver it had been something new and entirely personal--a place where beauty blooms in unexpected corners, where fragments evoke by implication the workings of the human heart. Her subjects had been ashcans, pushcarts, the marks of a child's hopscotch game on blistered pavement, a sidewalk puddle cradling a fallen leaf, the wonderful iridescence of oil stains in the gutter. The human figure seldom entered her work except in rare portraits like that of her clown friend, Emmett Kelly, with its perceptive mood of comedy and pathos. More often people and their emotions were obliquely implied by objects that bear the imprint of human use and suggest intimate associations.
MacIver's mature style had varied greatly, ranging from extreme realism to highly abstract designs. No orderly stylistic evolution was apparent, except perhaps a trend towards more brilliant color, which started after her first trip to Europe when she painted pictures like Venice with its rainbow reflections in the blue lagoon. But for the most part her style has varied according to the requirements of each individual subject. Often her pictures require a long second look to decipher fully; the eye is impressed first by her unusual patterns, her shifting color harmonies; only gradually does one perceive the identity of her forms and read their poetic meaning. Maclver's was a very feminine art of reticence, of intuition and tenderly lyrical feeling.
MacIver : Quite simple things can lead to discovery. This is what I would like to do with painting: starting with simple things, to lead the eye by various manipulations of colors, objects and tensions toward a transformation and a reward. . . .
My wish is to make something permanent out of the transitory, by means at once dramatic and colloquial. Certain moments have the gift of revealing the past and foretelling the future. It is these moments that I hope to catch.
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