Smoke Creek Ranch

Byron McClintock

Smoke Creek Ranch was one of the oldest settlements in the Western United Stated, situated in northeast Nevada near the California border. The name Smoke Creek now refers a stretch of land that follows the Smoke Creek between Honey Lake Valley in Susanville, California, to the Smoke Creek Desert basin, Nevada. The name alternately refers to the "smoke" that rises in winter from the hot springs associated with the area and the dust devils that race along the desert in summer.

Here, Byron McClintock uses a firey palette to convey the dry, arid landscape of eastern central California as it melts into its neighboring state. He has borrowed from this landscape before, drawn to the desolate beauty and ever-changing colors of the sky as the seasons transition.

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.