LA Weekly, December 31, 2004 – January 6, 2005
Art Pick of the Week

David McDonald’s once self-effacing sculpture is a lot more assertive these days, without losing its grungy diffidence. McDonald has subtly snuck a richer coloration into his floorbound Dagwood sandwiches of wood, wax, acrylic, and joint compounds. He has also cooked up a passel of really small, really informal, really colorful, and yet exquisitely reasoned and assembled shelf objects. In their winningly peculiar combination of offhandedness and obduracy, these neo-modern knickknacks marry Carl Andre to Richard Tuttle, revealing McDonald’s minimalist roots even more than do his relatively elaborate floor works. McDonald is also now painting, and his color jones really goes into overdrive here. But these lovely panels read as objects as much as they do pictures, picking up on the flat plane where the 3-D pieces leave off. -Peter Frank

From Idea to Matter: Some Thoughts on Sculpture - 2000

The illusion versus the real: this represents the fundamental difference between painting and sculpture. In painting, all is illusion: object, color, shape, perspective. Nothing is “real” beyond the illusion of reality created by the painter. It is, after all, all flat, all false, and, in the best hands, all is wonderful and filled with illusion.
It comes down to the reality of illusion versus the illusion of reality.
Really fine sculpture takes us beyond the “facts” of the material – metal, wood, whatever- into metaphor. It takes us beyond the concrete (no pun intended) into the implied, in the same way painting (and drawing, of course) takes us beyond the surface falsity to the suggested reality.
The two work identical if contradictory magics.

Sculpture is less popular than painting, I suspect, because it asks a more complex suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer or – perhaps – a more adventuresome mind. But sculpture’s rewards are in many ways deeper, by way of its vital “presence.”

The sculptors in this exhibit come from all over. Four of them are over fifty years old while others are variously younger. While none of them could be said to be household names yet – outside the art world, of course; within they are either very well known or getting there – some of the them have established powerful international reputations, while others are certain to do so. And the older four have the freshness of youth, and the younger have maturity beyond their years.

All of them have certain things in common – besides excellence, sureness, individuality, adventuresomeness – and paramount among them is, certainly, the “hands-on” quality of the work, the clear evidence of the artist making the art – molding, carving, manipulating, intruding. There is no theoretical work here, no work that is merely “idea.” It is all worked on, worked through from idea to matter.
That all the work is abstract to one degree or another merely states that it is, every piece of it, concerned with something beyond mere representation, and has to do with a redefinition of the nature of representation itself.
Oh, and furthermore, the work is tough and demanding and thrilling and absolutely beautiful. -Edward Albee

Express, February 19. 1999
OverThere – A Critical Guide to San Francisco Events

David McDonald’s stumpy white forms are spread out on the floor of Jennjoy gallery in such an erratic but deliberate pattern that they make the space around them as valuable as themselves. In the last few decades, some sculptors have felt that a work’s capacity to energize space is at odds with its quality as a discrete object: a form can emphasize on or the other. Bus in “still,” as the Jennjoy show is entitled, the vibrancy the installation brings to the air it fills has everything to do with the autonomy of its several objects.
The soft-surfaced cement column, tombstone-like blocks, upside down cone, and small green-veined rectangles attached to the walls awaken the room by being slightly unlike it, a whiter pause in its expanse. They guard the space the way tombstones do, marking out its emptiness, what is gone in it. As with John Beech’s structures, the energy they give off is not human but is nevertheless willful. Muffled, though not as silent as air, each form has a core of bright liquid paint (turquoise or fire-engine red or bright yellow) running through it-a streaming son amplifying the quiet voice of white. -Apollinaire Scherr

Bay Windows, November 12, 1998
More and Less

This show-“More and Less”- was put up by the artist team of Kelley and McDonald, installed in a lotsa-color-up-here/less-down-there pattern of Kelley’s sprightly colored wall pieces and McDonald’s minimally flavored wall and floor handmades. These paintings on canvas, collaged wall pouches, sculpted floor pieces, and wall works are all exhibited together but given breathing space. This reflects a trusting perspective by the gallery’s owners, Jim Smith and Rob Clifford, that makes for a good model for other galleries.

The installation-two seemingly disparate kinds of art shown together in both rooms- is a risky yet engaging one. Kelley and McDonald were once teacher and student at the Museum School, respectively, and though their work seems unrelated, I spoke with them briefly about the show and the relationships they may see.

While Kelley speaks of games, comics, and a certain “non-preciousness” he is after, McDonald alludes to Buddhist ceremonial gardens and the object’s color occurring naturally and from within. There is a shared concern with modesty of materials and scale and with the process itself. But, just as McDonald moves into a reappropriation of spirituality from the crass web of New Age art, Kelley eloquently states, “At one point, I thought God was the Incredible Hulk.” Then a certain smirk alights on each of our faces.

On a recent quiet Sunday, I found it much easier to sit and even lie on the floor with McDonald’s soft, mottled, whitish forms resting low on the floor and inching up the wall.

A kind of art-religion
I am intrigued by David McDonald’s coloring of his small sculptures by “natural” means. In one tuber-like shaft sprouting from the polyurethaned floor, a center has been carved out and then filled with various pigments, a shiny ochre topping the off. But the invisible color in the center tunnel has a function: it leaks outward through the white plaster, spreading light stains of lemon yellow on the bony outside. This seems a very personal kind of art-religion, in which this Moses makes his won complex commandments, imitating the laws of atmosphere and organic life. The irony of McDonald’s natural law is that he uses a bevy of chemically enhanced construction materials to form his objects of contemplation. A witches brew of hydrocal, bentonite, putty, Styrofoam, paint, and emulsion has become “Untitled 98-18,” giving me pause to consider the metaphysical effects of working with art material fumes.

This bumpy and hand-thrown piece is the sum of a larger clay pot form with a smaller drum-like pot of pumice gray sitting atop the larger vessel, forming an empty moat where the top and bottom meet. We can revere this flat, empty space and dream up a tribal rite being performed, a fresh concoction of herbs sliced and diced on top of someone’s crinkly hands holding this gravity-laden connection to the earth. There is a mini-population of flat tops amongst the floor pieces here, where the most skyward of places may hold the remnant plane of geological site.

“ Untitled 98-16” is the largest of McDonald’s pieces, a tower-like mound that stands nearly toddler tall. It slyly resembles a four-sided pyramid but has none of its sharp, angular pretensions to be a direct route to the heavens. There are no crisp edges here except the skeletal slats of wood left uncovered that reveal this to be a thoroughly human creation. It is a huggable house-without-a-door, an accessible and simple reference to our built world.

Other pieces are positioned lie sacred objects high above us on the wall or close to us at body level. “Formation #4” is constituted of strange inchworm (or cigar) twins of plaster and green-gray, hung at least three feet above an average gallery-goer’s height. The mysterious placement seems a bit forced, too much the artist’s own secret. This and a few of the smaller pieces don’t have enough with Lessness to hold me. When he works within an organic-architectural world where things melt into near-knowable, beautifully nuanced objects, McDonald is a supreme being.

LA Weekly, July 17-23, 1998
David McDonald’s floor hugging sculptures and disappearing-into-the-wall quasi-paintings are as gritty and rough-hewn as Ryan’s drawings are delicate and limpid; but these blocky pale white chunks of stuff exhibit their own dignity and, if not elegance, then their own clunky sensuousness. Actually, some of them do display relatively conventional touches of “beauty,” translucent plugs of deep, gem-like color set deep into the middle of hydrocal pillows. But it’s their coarse, weathered quality that makes McDonald’s hods, and the eccentric shapes attached flush to the wall that look like extrusions, so delicately poignant. -Peter Frank

The Santa Fean, Pasatiempo, May 10, 1996

McDonald’s Content to let the Next Stage Happen.

Last year, David McDonald was installing an exhibition of Richard Tuttle’s in a Los Angeles gallery. An artist himself, McDonald relished the opportunity to hang the work by one of his great mentors.

“ It was really a complicated piece,” McDonald said about one particular work. “On the back Tuttle had written, ‘Hang 15/16ths of a inch apart.’ I thought, why not an inch or 7/8ths or 3/4ths. He had probably tried all sorts of measurements and that was the one that worked.

“ It’s odd how Tuttle’s work can look so casual, yet it’s anything but,” McDonald said. It is in the balance extremely focused, deliberate and complex.

The same can be said for McDonald’s own pieces, wall and floor works as he calls them. Seemingly simple pieces carved out of common construction materials – plaster, wood, architectural drawing paper – McDonald’s small, delicate work is fraught with subtle tension between a variety of contradictions that edges close to quiet resolution.

“ Pure Land”, an exhibition of McDonald’s newest works, opens today, May 10, at Charlotte Jackson Fine Arts with an artist’s reception from 5 to 7p.m. Cleary about process, these pieces are also infused with a variety of dichotomies that belie their apparent modesty, between materials, techniques, the interplay between scale and perception, and controlled randomness.

I am interested in the way that nature is put together, the relationships between things, the contradictions, the interlocking elements, the chaos and order, the evolution and transformation of things, and the effects of time and use,” he said.

McDonald was standing in his unfinished studio in Topanga Canyon, Calif., recently, considering the work that comprises the show, is first in Santa Fe. Built by McDonald over a period of time, his studio is itself a utilitarian reflection of his work – his artistic materials put to recognizable form and function.

Everywhere wall works were tacked up onto plain, plastered surfaces. Floor pieces lay seemingly randomly on the floor or leaned up against the walls. Inspirational photographs hung over his desk – a Robert Irwin piece, Donald Judd’s bedroom, Brice Marden painting with a stick. The words, ‘No Mind Mind’ drawn on duraleen.
“ Ryman once said that the work should look like anyone can do it,” McDonald said. “I hope these look easy. But this one took me four months. That one five,” he said pointing to one of his smallest pieces.

“ You want them to be calm and quiet and to have some energy. To not be dead on the wall.” But, he said, therein lies the complex layering, fiddling, experimentation. And, ultimately intuition to know when enough is enough.

A graduate student of the California Institute of the Arts, a highly theoretical school, McDonald understand that theory is only imbued with vitality through process.

“ The problem with theory is that no one ever makes anything, “ he said. “I had a theory teacher there who had a baby. Afterwards he said that having the baby made him doubt theory.”

What McDonald did come away with was a highly critical eye not only toward a work’s execution, but also toward the ability to sit and wait. To let the work dictate to him where it needs to go, “to let the stage happen.”
He uses materials that are commonplace, particularly for him as he also works as a preparatory of exhibitions for many L.A. galleries. Eliciting materials into objects that have a life of their own is elemental to process art.
Techniques is also important for McDonald, working in a manner that allows both spontaneity and control. “I use a variety of techniques that allow a level of randomness in the result,” he said.

“ Casting is one such technique, for one is never sure exactly what will come out when the mold is opened.” McDonald frequently weaves casing material back into the object, which, he said, “allows some of the history of its making to come forward. Marks, stains and peelings that are a result of the process become and important part of the piece.”

McDonald works in small scale with the intent of drawing the viewer in. “A small scale invites attention,” he said. “When things are small one must get in close; with small floor work one must move carefully with awareness in order not to damage the piece.” But ultimately, it’s the finely choreographed visual, physical and metaphysical manipulations that drive the work – temporary, imperfect and vital. As another of his mentors, Agnes Martin wrote: “I hope I have made it clear that work is about perfection that we are aware of it in our mind but that the paintings are very far from being perfect –

Completely removed in fact – even as we ourselves are.”
-Lis Bensley

Los Angeles Times, Thursday, April 27, 1995
Art Reviews: Literary Music

David McDonald’s art conjures what Milan Kundera has called “the unbearable lightness of being.” There is something literary in “Trace”, his show at Dan Bernier Gallery. In fact, McDonald’s attractive and very fragile works are much closer to musical compositions, especially in terms of their rhythmic variations upon particular themes.

McDonald pursues many of the gambits availed by Postminimal aesthetics: repetition and variation, craft and handiwork, ephemerality as ruling principle. Each piece, composed of several discrete forms that relate closely to one another, is a series of microcosm.

The standard element is a delicate basswood frame, with a sheet of semi-transparent Duralene stretched around it. This might be large of small; it might or might not have a small piece of tracing paper laid on top of it, affixed with tiny strips of masking tape or invisible glue; the tracing paper might or might not be covered with a layer of wax; it might be enlivened with very fine, oil-stick markings-or not. The other elements of the series, hung alongside, above or beneath this image/object, improvise within its parameters.

One of the more interesting aspects of McDonald’s work is its fascination with the moment in which the transparent becomes the opaque. One piece explores the way in which layers of scotch tape and tracing paper conceal what lies beneath; another, the way in which small fragments of white cloth seem to expose their wooden supports.

These are admittedly unassuming conceits. Yet, when the artist goes for something more substantial the careful balance McDonald sets up is thrown out of whack. The pictorial nature of the work militates against issues like mass, volume and space.

This kind of miscalculation suggests that the artist is still somewhat tentative about his strengths. He need not be. His work is compelling when it eschews the matter-of-fact realities of the object and addresses the everyday deceptions of the image. -Susan Kandel

LA Weekly, April 7, 1995
Art Picks of the Week

After Bergamot comes “Bergamette,” the unofficial name for the still-new cluster of (so far) four galleries at the nether end of Santa Monica’s industrial east side. The prevailing flavor here, though, is the diffident insouciance associated with Food House (itself currently in limbo).

David McDonald’s new work, conflating sculpture and drawing, realizes an improbable fusion of delicacy and near-invisibility with great density and heft. This dualism shows emphatically in the two rows of near-tissue-paper pieces stretched over light wood bars leaning on the floor against shin-high concrete barriers. Elsewhere McDonald positions opaque panels next to transparent ones, draws sparingly on translucent pages affixed to the wall, suspends membranes on flimsy-seeming armatures, and generally plays with a Zen-post-minimal not-there-ness. Only a year ago McDonald was showing squat, obdurate plywood-plaster platforms in a similar, but much more aggressive, investigation of self-effacement. The current work replaces such droll contrariness with a tender charm.-Peter Frank

Visions Art Quarterly, Fall 1992
Labors of Love

On a parallel course, David McDonald’s first solo exhibit was humbly and appropriately entitled “Plain”. Although more related to the Protestant work ethic and sensibility, McDonald’s serene grouping of fourteen utilitarian objects not only addressed the merits of the work itself, but honored those who truly labor. The pieces themselves float between functional (possibly domestic) objects and minimal sculpture. Constructed of modest and familiar materials like plaster and second-hand plywood, the unobtrusively filled the vast and airy gallery comprising an installation that invoked the sublime. Each individual piece beckons close observations as well, however, and offers in return the antidote of a devotional entity.

Modest in their scale and presentation, all of McDonald’s untitled works amount to piles of materials, layered so that they rise from the floor (or just off the walls) at heights reminiscent of ordinary footstools. Like stacks of freshly laundered cloths, sheathes of yellowing documents, or makeshift storage containers, these enigmatic works imply a history of memory and toil. All the while, the artist is careful to let the process of his craft show. In a sense, this show became an observance of labor itself. It was reverently mindful of a traditional philosophy of “making”, where actual yield is valued less than the virtue of the simple act of working. Deeply rooted in early American thought, such an ethos may seem nostalgic, considering our post-industrial economy, but McDonald gives these ideas a different spin. By emphasizing the ritual of his own activity, he projects a stance that can outlive the trend of 1990’s moderation. He demonstrates the restorative power of contemplation and endurance. Within a secularized vernacular, McDonald joins Roarke in pursuit of human redemption. -Timothy Nolan