Max McConkey

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." (Francis Bacon)

My colorful, textural pieces - most on hardboard/boxes - are created with oil, crayon, pastels, and, sometimes, a multitude of other materials, which has included cement, cloth, and wood.
While I am an admirer of many artists (e.g., Diebenkorn, Rothko, Franz Kline, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Rebecca Crowell), my principal inspiration is nature: streams, forest floors, southwest deserts, mountain walls of rock. While I have no interest in attempting to replicate what I see, I do work to recreate some of the thrill of texture and color I get observing what nature offers us.
While my professional work for four decades has been in education (communications, research, policy advocacy), art has been a passion since boyhood. In the late 1960s I created a cartoon strip distributed nationally by the Liberation Press and have done caricatures and oil portraits throughout the years, but my great love is abstraction.
My wife, Emely, also an artist, and I -- with our two dogs -- make our home in southern Arizona -- both in Tucson and, 60 miles away, in the lovely mountain community of Patagonia.