Artist's Opening Reception, Saturday, October 25, 6–8pm

Painter and illustrator DeLoss McGraw (b. 1945) returns to Couturier Gallery with I’ve Run Away From The Circus, a show of 60 gouache paintings including many double-sided works, as well as four bronze and painted wood sculptures celebrating the circus of life inspired by the writing of Bertolt Brecht, Robert Creeley, William Faulkner, Christopher Isherwood among others.

The core of McGraw’s work is rooted in literature, but inspiration come from other sources as well. Many of the works in this show were derived from the silent films genre, such as Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus” from which the show’s title originates. Inspiration also came from the CoBrA art school, a 20th-Century European avant-garde movement celebrating the complete freedom of form and color. McGraw exercises that freedom in verve and verse by combining his love of literary text and distinctive color palette with expressive figures.

McGraw himself operates like a vagabond in a traveling circus, often setting up his studio as he moves from town to town. “I’ve Run Away From the Circus” includes works created in Germany, Oklahoma and California. In discussing how he arrived at the theme of the show, DeLoss explains: “I pushed circus everywhere and found it on my front porch. Isn’t that where the circus of life always is, all three rings are right in front of us?”

McGraw’s early career took shape when he combined his illustrative skills with the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer W.D. Snodgrass. McGraw sent Snodgrass a series of paintings that paid tribute to his work, and he in turn wrote several poems inspired by these pieces. The literary and collaborative aspect to McGraw’s work was set, and over his nearly forty year career he has worked with many writers including Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and author Gabriel Garcia Márquez. His work has taken inspiration from literature as diverse as Günter Grass’, The Tin Drum, to Lewis Carroll’s, Alice In Wonderland. The latter for which he won the Illustrator’s Society Book of the Year Award in 2002.

DeLoss McGraw’s distinctive work has been shown in many solo and group shows as well as in book illustration, catalogue publications and theatre set designs throughout the United States and Europe. His work may be found in the permanent collections of the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, San Francisco, CA; Cincinnati Symphony Collection, Cincinnati, OH; Copley Library, La Jolla, CA; Cornell University, Special Collection Library, Ithaca, NY; Cranbrook Museum of Art, Michigan; Columbia University, Special Collection Library, NY, NY; East Central University, OK; Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, CA; Harvard University, Houghton Collection Cambridge, MA; Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, HI; J. Paul Getty Museum, Brentwood, CA; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; New York Public Library, NY, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Oxford University, Bodleian Collection, Oxford, England; Rochester Museum of Art, Rochester, NY, NY; Stanford University, Special Collection Library, Stanford, CA; University Art Museum, Long Beach State University, Long Beach, CA; University of CA, Special Collection Library, Berkeley, CA; University of Houston, Special Collection Library, Houston, TX; University of New Mexico, Tamarind Collection, Albuquerque, NM; Whitney Museum of Art, Library Collection, NY, NY