Artist: R.Brownell McGrew

The life of R. Brownell McGrew as an artist began at a very early and very tender age, according to a family legend which goes something like this: “A doctor in Columbus, Ohio, dropped his stethoscope and aplomb one night when a freshly delivered baby snatched a pencil from him and started to draw. His earliest memories of school are of being sent around, under the protection of an older student, among the upper classes to display examples of his drawings. So he really cannot say when it all began, but certainly long before the age of eight when his family moved to California.” He was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1916.One of the most fortunate circumstances of his life was attending Alhambra High School in California when the art department was headed by Lester Bonar, an outstanding watercolorist and surely as fine a high school art teacher as the Nation has known a view based on the careers of his students.

Following several years of more or less private study, he began in earnest with four strenuous years at Otis Art Institute under Edouard Vysekal and E. Roscoe Shrader, but principally with Ralph Holmes, under whom he found himself aesthetically and to whom he owes more than he can begin to say. His schooling was accomplished by the help of three full scholarships, a special faculty award and a post as assistant instructor in his final year.

School was succeeded by a period of work with the picture studios, MGM, Columbia, and Alexander Korda.

When the John F. and Anna Lee Stacey Foundation program got under way, he was the first winner and was able through this grant to concentrate on landscape study, a most decisive help, for all his training had been in the field of portrait and figure work. A dozen years later he was made chairman of the Stacey Committee and has tried to repay some part of what he owes this project.

At various times and points along the path outlined, he picked up letters in football and track, a national championship in archery, the world's best wife, and the Pauline conviction that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.” For ten years or so he did little except landscape, which became almost exclusively preoccupied with desert motifs after he moved to the Palm Springs-La Quinta area, and it was due to this involvement that he began to go sketching with the matchless Jimmy Swinnerton. As recounted in the preamble to his journals, Jimmy was responsible for his introduction to the Indian country, and he was but one of a throng of young painters who found Jimmy a friend, ally, teacher, and inspiration. Indians pulled him into. Arizona and bulldozers shoved him out of California so it was only a question of time until he and his family settled in cozily with Valley National and all Arizona's other blessings. The McGrews live in Cottonwood, Arizona, a perfect place for an artist who loves the beauty of nature in an unspoiled land.

Being curious about his plans for the future as an artist (he is a comparatively young man and has many productive years to go) we questioned him at length on that subject and received an engaging and interesting reply: “Someone remarked of such material as the above that it is 'suffocatingly subjective' and I feel a great need for air, but the editor bears the blame for his insistence, and for an answer I must give to his question whether I expect to go on painting Indians. I enjoy painting many things, but always I find the fascination of Indian themes too strong to leave for long. I am somewhat bitterly sensible of the criticism that such work is a living in the past, a yearning for times that are irrevocably gone, but I reject this doctrinaire mindlessness and reply with what restraint I can summon that I am not in the least concerned with the past, but with the eternal and the universal, about which the Indians have much to say to a perilously effete America. If we will not listen and heed, we shall find ourselves continuing to build a way of life that is not worth living, and certainly the behavior of increasing numbers of our people suggests they have found this to be already true for them. To express it so, does not mean the Indian must or will articulate structured answers to specific difficulties, but that a reflective person, eschewing fads and jargon, will be taught many salubrious truths as he contemplates the beauty and strength of these people of the earth.” Ralph Brownell McGrew has come a long way in art since at the age of eight, when, through the fortuitous decision of his parents he became a Westerner. (Incidentally the “R” is for Ralph, but his close friends call him “Brownie.” “Brownie's” work has found its way into museums and private collections all over America, and critical acclaim has not only been generous but enthusiastic and deservedly so. We are pleased to report here some appreciative evaluations of his art. “Whether it be portrait, landscape, Indian or horse, the mastery of artistic subject matter by Brownell McGrew comes through to the viewer with such tremendous impact that there is an involuntary and automatic recognition that 'this is a McGrew.' ” Thus the late Ed Ainsworth, in his book, The Cowboy in Art, characterizes the work of one painter whose canvases have an equal appeal to the critical experts and to those who admire fine art.

For three consecutive years McGrew won double awards at the annual exhibition of the Society of Western Artists, which draws over 100,000 people. In each case one award was judged by jury and one was selected by popular vote: twice both awards went to the same painting.

Another double award indicated the response to two McGrew paintings submitted to the Springville (Utah) 44th Annual National Invitational Exhibit in 1968.

In seven years of exhibiting at the Death Valley All-California Invitational, McGrew has taken seven awards, five of them first prizes. These awards went to paintings based on his experiences with the Hopi and Navajo Indians of Arizona, subjects portrayed with the impressive technique which has won him the title of "Dean of Southwestern Painters." Irene Porter, European critic, writing in the magazine Phoenix, writes: "Most fascinating is the fact that despite the 'Old Master' effect, McGrew's powerful brush stroke is definitely impressionistic. His faces are drawn with immense compassion and stunning reality. Life and death, joy and sorrow, are all melted together by the beautiful warmth of his colors, his deep understanding and love for the Indian race and the desert."

The Los Angeles Home Show Invitational Exhibit, which attracts more than 175,000 people each year, has featured a McGrew Indian painting each of the two years of its existence under the auspices of the Council of Traditional Artists Societies. Mr. Claude Parsons, eminent painter and president of the Council, wrote: "Last March I attended the Wyeth exhibition in New York and also went to the Metropolitan to see Rembrandt's Aristotle, acquired at the highest price ever paid for a painting. On neither occasion, nor at any other time or place, have I seen a work that created such intense public interest as R. Brownell McGrew's The Dinneh at the Home Show Exhibit. It held people spellbound."

McGrew is one of thirteen artists whose work is featured in the book Painters of the Desert, by Ed Ainsworth, who wrote: "The spirit of Rembrandt under a smoke tree . . . a wanderlust for by-ways in the desert . . . painting techniques from the Old Masters . . . these ingredients have united to form the figure of a painter passionately dedicated to an ideal combining all the elements of the vast region of dunes and arroyos in the American West.

"In both portraits and landscapes he excels. In both he conveys an innate resoluteness and power rarely encountered on the American scene today.

"He seems to draw upon some inner vision to cloak the objects he paints whether living or inanimate with that indescribable quality sometimes imparted by the artist to give a particularized meaning to his individual work."

Mr. Merlin Enabnit, Chicago painter of international renown, known as "The Color Wizard," calls him "one of the world's finest portrait artists," and writes: "I feel that anything I can do to let the world know of Mr. McGrew's astounding ability is my pleasure. In each of my color clinics I conduct over the United States I never fail to mention the tremendous impression his work has made on me. I feel that his paintings inspire not only greater grandeur to the human race, but also a greater dignity to all of us."

At the Old Town Gallery, San Diego, Desert and Western Exhibit in 1968, a jury of notables of the art world, including Frederick Whittaker, deemed McGrew's entry worthy of the award, "Best of Show."

These are the experts. In every place where McGrew's paintings are shown, crowds of people who come again and again to see them confirm these judgments. The president of "Showcase 21," a Los Angeles association, writes: "It was a high honor that your painting Hosteen Speck was hung in Showcase 21. It really stole the show and throughout the month some people came in as often as twice a week to see it."

A more moving comment was reported by Barbara Perl-man, reviewing for The Arizonian: ". . . a teenage boy walked into (the gallery). He stopped in front of Old Ones Talking, a picture of wizened elders in naked contemplation of mortality. 'That's just what they look like,' he exclaimed in the rather too loud, blandly callous tone of adolescence. 'Old and ugly.' Then his voice trailed off in perplexity. 'And beautiful, actually . . . ."

McGrew's paintings are evocative in four dimensions: of the height and depth and breadth of the desert country, and the curvature of time stretching back away from man's pre-occupation and technology. They say to the beholder: "Look, and see. There is beauty all around us do not miss it. Creation is infinitely beautiful do not pass by unseeing."

One thing for sure, he knows the Indians, he understands them and, as you can see from reproductions herein, he loves them. Only an artist with perfect mastery of the tools of his trade, a discerning eye, compassion in his heart, and sensitivity of mind can portray such subjects so well. The artist captures the soul and beauty of his Indian friends. Few, if any, have done it better . . . R.C.