McWillie Chambers at Tricia Collins Grand Salon

By Bill Sullivan for COVER Magazine

McWillie Chambers’ painting is not in any way confrontational, and yet he confronts a great dilemma and lets his own inherent graciousness resolve it.   The dilemma is that most, but not all, of Chambers’ subject matter is the male nude.  There is a man with an erection, and in past shows there have been sex acts portrayed. Some, but not all, of his sources are porno mags, beefcake and underwear ads.   He also works from original photos, his own and others, and from people he remembers from the street – even briefly glanced.  In fact, memory is the key to this work.  Memory fueled by desire draws him to these innocent athletes. He doesn’t paint apples and flowers, or the destitute and desperate, the hopeless.  He paints what he needs to paint, and is totally committed to a positive, affirmative view of life.  An apple doesn’t turn him on, and his paintings are a respite from the suffering in the world we know all too well.  If this is gay art, it must be most successful because that seems irrelevant. The sources of this work are actually beside the point.  After all, this is not exploitation.  Rather it is a celebration of desire, the memory of desire.   This work flirts with you, engaging in an erotic dialog rather than being voyeuristic.  Never were men and places so desirable.  And place is why, as much as the men.  

Chambers grew up in Louisiana, the home of deep south graciousness and sophistication.  The only landscape in this show tells the whole story.  How less the show would be without it.  Chambers was raised with the rare attitude toward life, difficult for us New Yorkers to actually believe, and so we look for the falsity.   Bigots will find it in gender preference, but even they will be seduced by the paint.  The paint flows and moves across the surface, and in the space.  Not for a moment does its sensuousness relent.   The paint is hot, the color dazzling, the light subtropical.   We are given the climate of New Orleans, the heat, the humidity, the air you can really see.   In this place he remembers and desires, he puts men he remembers and desires, and every one of them is a portrait that transcends likeness and makes instead an erotically spiritual connection with the soul.  Even when the sexuality is frank to the point of being blunt, an innocence is retained, and this innocence is the true content of this work.  With great honesty, we are given an innocence that many of us have forgotten or never knew.  Chambers’ Memory stimulates our own desire. 

In the catalogue essay by Bill Arning, this work is put in the tradition of Cadmus, French and Tchelitchew.  These paintings seem very different in attitude, style, sense of time and message. The only similarity is subject matter. And even that’s different.  If he painted apples would he be in the tradition of Cezanne?  Charles Demuth and Duncan Grant are mentioned as sharing a personal, private point of view. This work is so out of the closet that the comparison is hard to understand.  And finally, even poor latent Tom Eakins is brought up.  Better to have considered the case of David Hockney or Janet Fish if she were a gay man.  Hockney and Fish are artists who indulge in joy, who epitomize the uniquely American constitutional right to pursuing happiness.  The self absorbed narcissism of gay culture and its clichés keep us from Chambers’ paintings.  If we can get beyond this and accept the true nature of these paintings we will be embraced by innocence.