Philip McCracken:
Beyond the Sun

Artist Bio

Philip McCracken was born in 1928. He received a degree in sculpture from the University of Washington in 1953. After an apprenticeship with the renowned sculptor Henry Moore in England, and a year in New York, he settled on Guemes Island off the coast of Seattle. With its natural beauty and tranquil peace, Guemes Island has served as a source of inspiration for McCracken for over 40 years. It is poetic places like Guemes Island where one feels most profoundly. the pulse of nature and the dynamic energy of the cosmos. McCracken has translated these sensations into beautifully crafted objects of wood. His abstract forms radiate and pulsate – expand and contract – evoking the power and wonderment of the macrocosm that lies “beyond the sun.”

Exhibition Statement

Transition is the word that comes readily to mind: the artist embarking in a radically new direction. McCracken was known for the forms of nature- the rounded shape of the owl, the deadly symmetry of the bird of prey, the irrepressible power of the shoots of spring. All these forms derive from the energy, the inspiration of the natural world.

At first glance, the abstract forms of this Universe series spoke of the mathematical mind at work. Gone was the rounded sensuality of biologic nature. Each piece is bold geometry, the angularity of Euclid. Looking closer, past the symbolic angularity to the swirling gases, the hurtling spheres, the violent explosions and the invisible lines of gravity bending the radiation of each sun, spinning gyres of solar wind across the vast distances of black, cold, intergalactic space. On the surface of it, this was sculpture far removed from the earlier McCracken nature forms.

So, it seems, until the viewer realized the solar winds and swirling galaxies are the microcosm in the grain of wood. The thread of consistency begins to spin from the work like silk from the worm. The artist, with subtlety, has interwoven the filaments of natural form and substance with the geometric into a universal tapestry of understanding. The silk thread that weaves steadily through this art is knowledge: the knowledge of the natural world from the seed to the cosmos.

There is risk here: the artist moving away from the biological forms that have become a hallmark. Like astronomers, McCracken steeped himself in physics and mathematics, read the treatises of time and distance, and continued, on clear black nights unmasked by city lights, to observe the heavens.

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