Many artists work in several veins, often distinguished by medium—painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture—and sometimes by subject matter. Joe Macca’s output is that he works in ways that are polar opposites—hot/cold, perfect/messy, slow/fast, meditative/mad.
Macca creates paintings that are carefully planned and perfectly executed abstractions that respond to the natural world or, as the artist puts it, that express the “literal and symbolic, ephemeral and transient.”
Color has become an increasingly important element in Joe’s paintings. For a time he matched color from things in his everyday world and created simple abstract forms to describe them. He is now using color in a multifaceted way: to express the literal vs. symbolic; the actual vs. remembered.
Joe has always thought of his paintings as ‘representational’ despite their severe abstractness. Color functions as the primary representational tool in this way. Sometimes the work is meant to function as homage, other times as investigations into private memories.
