PHILIPWILLIAMSPOSTERS

           Jake McCord

            American Folk Artist

b. 1945 in Thomson , Georgia

    Like cartoons, Jake McCord's paintings are about people and animals who inhabit a flat and colorful world.  His subjects are solid and poised, grimacing in the center of the composition with naive integrity like a person unused to having his picture taken.  Usually alone (but sometimes invited to share their composition with a small dog or a muscular beachcomber), his portraits are like exiled Coney-Island types, relegated to an empty plane.  And although his subjects are of diverse origins (black people, white people, sheep, cows, dogs) they share a common alarmed expression.

    As with all folk art - which, by its very anthropological pretense, serves, before its autonomous aesthetic value, to illustrate the story of its own emergence - the potency of McCord's paintings is bolstered by his story.  Born in 1945 in Thomson, Georgia, Jake McCord lived and worked for over thirty years on his family farm.  He then moved into a space that been a cafe and worked cutting grass for a cemetery for a decade.  It is rumored that he began painting after observing a group of women in a drawing class. 

    McCord says he watches a lot of television, a habit made manifest in his style: from the consistently squarish rectangular shape of his compositions to his luminous palette, each painting can be viewed as a still-life of a TV monitor.  He paints in his front yard on large pieces of plywood that he later displays and sells according to his daily whims.  One can imagine an arc of painted televisions positioned around his Georgia lawn, like a pre-electronic Crazy Eddie's, with each screen playing a different program.