Ano Nuevo by Byron McClintock

Ano Nuevo by Byron McClintock

Ano Nuevo

Byron McClintock

Title

Ano Nuevo

 
Artist
Year
2005  
Technique
mezzotint, roulette and drypoint printed chine collé 
Image Size
12 1/4 x 9 11/16" outside platemark 
Signature
pencil, lower right margin 
Edition Size
2 of 20  
Annotations
dated and editioned in pencil 
Reference
 
Paper
Akatosashi Kozo supported on Rives BFK heavyweight 
State
published 
Publisher
artist 
Inventory ID
BYMC138 
Price
SOLD
Description

Año Nuevo State Park encompasses Año Nuevo Island and Año Nuevo Point, which are known for the pinniped rookeries. Located in San Mateo County, the low, rocky, windswept point juts out into the Pacific Ocean about fifty-five south of San Francisco. This mezzotint is McClintock’s visceral response to the landscape and his colors, Naphthol red, raw sienna, and black, combine with his lines to give the image power, drama, and depth.

Byron McClintock was born in Klamath Falls, Oregon in 1930. In 1946, he joined the Merchant Marines, sailing throughout the Pacific. He moved to San Francisco in 1949 and enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) where he studied under Edward Corbett, Richard Diebenkorn, and James Budd Dixon. During those years he served as class monitor for Dixon’s printmaking class and printed lithographs for many of the students. In the early 1950s, McClintock tended bar at Vesuvio Café, a saloon that was an important hangout for the Beat artists, and he shared a studio in the Mission District with Ernest Briggs.

McClintock served in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1955. After his discharge, he returned to San Francisco where he co-owned Acme Photoengraving, a photoengraving business specializing in commercial advertising work, until 1980. During the 1960s McClintock exhibited his paintings at the John Boles Gallery in San Francisco and, in the late 1970s, he purchased a large studio on Howard Street and bought a press to return to printmaking.

New York Abstract Expressionist print collector, Charles Dean, rediscovered Byron McClintock in the early 1990s. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased a few of his prints and included them in a Recent Acquisitions exhibition in 2004. At Dean’s urging, McClintock traveled to New York from the Pacific Northwest to see his work hanging in the Whitney. McClintock’s work is also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.