Daniel McCoy has painted around fifty pieces since October, most of them at night. He runs three trips a day between Española and Santa Fe, has two hours to paint in between, then stays up until two or three in the morning before stopping on the porch to look up at the mountains and listen to the animals. Some of the peaks seem to glow in the dark. "I don't know if it's my eyes or if it's my imagination," he says, "but they seem to glow with like a power." By August he had a whole cohesive body of work.
That show, We Can Only Go Up From Here, opens August 7. The title is about elevation, about driving north toward Taos and Colorado with loved ones and looking up toward the sky, prayers, dreams, peaks of mountains. One of the largest pieces is Nambé Falls, painted after a family picnic there on his birthday, his first time back in twenty years. It also came with an epiphany. McCoy usually avoids painting water, especially man-made lakes, until he realized nearly every waterway he's lived around has a dam or a road or some human alteration. "Most of the waterways I've lived around my entire life have been man-made," he says. "That was kind of an epiphany."
He set out to dial in the realism this year, head up toward Taos, and then the work had other ideas. "The psychedelic pop background, anti-establishment part of Danny just came through and blew it all up," he says. He talks about bringing in four or five paintings at a time and refusing to look at what he'd already done, just to keep moving, and then seeing the thread run through all of them at once. Abiquiú became a place of focus he never planned on. "Sometimes the art really guides its own way where it's painting itself," he says. "I am maybe not in control of it. It's kind of doing its own thing."
The paint techniques go back further than the show. Those squiggly line works started at Osborne Design, the sign shop where he worked young, in the spot they let him shake the excess thinner out of his brushes. "My arm used to be so sore," he says, and the shoulder got strong enough to arm wrestle. Now he works with a double-ought brush and can't go any smaller. He's trying to loosen the OCD grip a little, move toward something more painterly, more abstract as he gets older, though he admits he can't quite stand it yet and reworks everything until it's tight.
There's a version of McCoy that reads people through their marks. He shared a studio with an artist who dripped on everything, and swears that from a single square inch of drip across the room he'd know exactly who it was. Beadwork, quilts, prints, southwestern painters he came up around in the museum world. "If there was an art square inch Jeopardy, I might be a champ," he says. Kara names what he keeps calling isolation as something else: not a hermit shut away but in deep communion with the land, watching it come alive at dusk. In this episode we get into hoop dancing wins, monsoon storms rocking the studio, thriving on stress as a drug of choice, and what it means to be the vessel or the conduit rather than the one in charge. "I'm just kind of the vessel or the conduit for it," he says.