Joseph McCullough
Birth Date: 1922
Death Date: 2012
Artist Gallery
Joseph McCullough was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1922. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art and received his BFA and MFA from Yale University. McCullough landed at Yale during a serendipitous moment when he could call Lewis E.York and Josef Albers his mentors. In 1952, McCullough returned to Cleveland to serve as teacher and administrator at his alma mater. Within three years, he would be named its director and he retained this position for 33 years. On his arrival, he taught classes in color and light, concurrently exploring those properties in his own work. Much of McCullough’s artwork during the mid-1950s sprang from a sculpture he spotted on a country road south of Cleveland. Someone had fashioned a rugged metal contraption that suggested parts of a rural home, complete with dormer, weather vane, old shingles, windmill blades, tractor and a carousel. McCullough says he stood in the rain and sketched the work for five minutes. His soggy sketches would direct the next five years of his creative activity, yielding hundreds more drawings, and dozens of paintings. For McCullough, one could paint a subject only by exploring it from every conceivable vantage point. A similar epiphany set off his next two thematic series. On a different drive, in southern Ohio, he spotted an installation of bottles hanging from fence posts and bells hanging from trees. McCullough crawled under the fence and began sketching again. For the next five to seven years, he painted what he called “literal abstracts,” featuring bottle forms. By now, he had added Duco enamel and acrylics to his palette. He next painted a series of “Soundscapes,” lyrical paintings designed to resonate for the ear as well as the eye, a metaphysical experiment on canvas. McCullough’s paintings from the 1960s, inspired by the sounds and images of nature, were bold, expressive, and stunning.  McCullough notes that in the early years, he had to limit himself to paints that dried quickly. Because he was so busy with administrative duties, he did not have the luxury of waiting three days to see how oil would dry. Nor could he cease painting for any long period of time. “I had to stay right up with faculty and students," he says. “I believed I could say anything to them if I was able to stay with them, practicing what they do.” McCullough’s personal and artistic lives are deeply intertwined. He served as a bomber pilot in WWII, a perilous experience imprinting indelible memories of the earth seen through veils of clouds, smoke, fire, and black flak. Later, he became interested in outdoor activities that would bring him close to nature, like birding and fly fishing. His mature painting was influenced by those life experiences. He is essentially a landscape and “soundscape” painter, seeking the purified memory of the sights and sounds of nature, the abstract “remembrance” rather than the detailed literal image of the scene. Stylistically, he might belong to the Modernist school of Abstract Expressionism, but still his style was uniquely his own. He is also a two-time recipient of the coveted Cleveland Arts Prize, first in 1970 for his outstanding painting, and then again in 1988 for his leadership and international expansion of the Cleveland Institute of Art.