Vince MacDermot
Vince MacDermot was born in Montreal on June 14, 1957. He came to the United States as a child with his family in 1964, and they settled in Staten Island, New York.
Vince MacDermot practices art and architecture. His current painting series is ‘Big Red NYC’. The series is a companionable 20-piece batch of deliberate, large, 60 by 84-inch edge-to-edge red paintings. Inside, an articulate figure, drama or protagonist is precisely established in bright white paint.
About red. It’s the opposite of a complicated colour strategy. “I like red,” MacDermot says. “It’s about impact”. He’s aware of the red + white, one-two punch, as in the Red Cross logo and Campbell’s Tomato Soup (Warhol). For MacDermot, red is the heated springboard of a narrative relayed in white.
Clearly, Pop Art speaks to MacDermot, as it does to many artists of his generation. Roy Lichtenstein, master of comic book appropriation, enjoys special status in his personal image bank, so do some others - Basquiat, Keith Haring and Chuck Close among them; all digested the lessons of Pop Art, but put what they learned to different uses.
MacDermot, a longtime New Yorker, grew up in a musical household. His father Galt MacDermot is the Grammy and Tony Award-winning composer of ‘HAIR’.
MacDermot began drawing as a boy, coached by his great-aunt, celebrated Canadian painter Ann Savage (1896-1971). At a time when art instruction meant colouring within the lines, she had enlightened, alternative methods. She set out materials, paper and paints, with few instructions and much encouragement. She would say, “Just draw some circles and lines and add some colour and see what happens”, MacDermot recalls. He still reports to this system, approaching drawing as skilled improvisation.
He had formal art training in high school and studied architecture at New York Institute of Technology. Afterwards, he badgered his way into architect Paul Rudolph’s Manhattan office. MacDermot greatly admired Rudolph’s ‘crazy,’ controversial Art and Architecture Building at Yale.
And now, he’s successfully and enthusiastically immured in “Red”. What’s next, MacDermot was asked recently. “Blue”, he deadpanned in response.