Art is Old, and New Again

Jacquelyn McBain is one of those artists whose work grabs you by the throat and won’t let go until you consider it. From The Orion:

ANY ART, HOWEVER OBSCURE, may suddenly become an important influence for a new generation; one never knows when the past might become revolutionary; when some historical, ostensibly dead art may be resurrected as vital resource and trustworthy guide in an uncertain present. The current return to the Old Masters, as seen in Jacquelyn McBain’s excruciatingly-detailed paintings, is indeed postmodern in the sense that it involves the search for emotional warmth and authenticity in a cold, inhospitable world; a large, very public world in which one must make one’s own privacy to survive…

…McBain gives the familiar dialectic of nature and society, man and woman, a subtle new ecological expression. The threat to woman and to nature are one and the same for her; both are victims of man and the society he rules and the technology he invents. There is no protection against man and his destructive technology here.