What a Face. What a Body.

It’s the Gigastar Roundup Show at Esteban Sabar.

By Rachel Swan

The models in Marty McCorkle’s paintings — olive-skinned Nicolo with his angular brows and severe cornrows; sexy, brown-haired Pat; and baseball player Travis Becktel, whom gallery owner Esteban Sabar describes as “a very sex-symbol kind of guy” — don’t normally do this kind of thing for money. But McCorkle prefers them over professional models. “I like the unsureness about what’s gonna happen,” the artist says. “It’s much more spontaneous and you get a better sense of their body language.”

Figure by Pool. Marty McCorkle

McCorkle started painting landscapes at age eight, modeling his images from scenes printed on the backs of sugar packets. He cites painters like Velázquez and Caravaggio as early sources of inspiration, and says he even went through a “semi-Chuck-Close era,” emulating the painter who fills his canvases with little colored squares that form a picture when you stand back and squint at them. But McCorkle got tired of all the squinting. He wanted to teach his audience to look at bodies in a new way: “I kept making the pixels bigger and bigger so that no matter how far away you stood it would still look distorted.”

Travis on Floor with Mirror. Marty McCorkle

Now, McCorkle photographs his models on a blank studio floor and Photoshops their images, contorting the pixels to get weird shapes and distorted flesh tones. He enjoys the “distressing effect” of oil paints on canvas, because the toughness of the canvas and gooeyness of the oil creates lights and darks. Since he’s abandoned the traditional practice of outlining his portraits on canvas, McCorkle relies on high-contrast lighting to create shape, roundness, and “the sense of a body.” He says Pat’s a real natural for that: “She was really clever about creating and shadows and contrasts and the way she distorted her own body. I think she understands my previous paintings in ways that I didn’t.”

Pat on Circular Bed. Marty McCorkle

Though McCorkle launched his career painting landscapes, he now treats the body as a landscape. In each piece, he invents a background that’s supposed to be an extension of that body’s psychology. One of his more seductive works features Pat reclined on a circular bed, which seemed appropriate for the composition. “There’s something very Austin Powers or hypersexual about the bed,” he says, adding that it really fits Pat’s character — she’s pretty sexy.

Detail of Pat on Circular Bed.

Marty McCorkle showcases his work this month at Esteban Sabar Gallery’s Gigastar Roundup Show, which also features Bethany Ayres, Patricia Gillespie, Guy Colwell, and the amazing visionary art of Diego Rios.

East Bay Express
December, 2006