In a room which once held great stacked boxes of honey from his apiary business, Jerry McGahan now paints to the quiet drone of NPR on the radio, his canvases stacked against the walls and tables of his converted studio.  “’Tuer’ means ‘doer’”, he tells me while pulling a painting from a stack, “and ‘ama’ means ‘love’, so the word ‘amateur’ is a doer of what one loves.”  
    McGahan has done much of what he loves over his lifetime—beekeeping, annual travels to the open air markets of Mexico, film making, fiction writing, and of course, painting which he continues to do and aims to never stop.  “It’s good to do something that never ends, that you could get better at forever, and that gives you as much pleasure.”  
    For him, the discipline of painting has been trans-formative.  “Painting changes how I go outside, wherever I am.  I’m just seeing things in terms of paint,” says McGahan, his eyes bright and wistful behind his glasses, “so that changes my whole perception of the world.  I have this whole other filter that I look through, and it just makes my life larger.”                                
    And this renewed perception shows in McGahan’s paintings that communicate a tender vision of the world.  Supple brushwork.  Subdued color tones.  Soft lighting techniques.  His paintings delight in quietly witnessed moments of activity in which the subjects in each of his paintings give off a warm luminous glow that seems to descend upon figures caught in intimate poses—two women braiding hair, a young man draped over a parking meter as he whispers in his lover’s ear, a man plowing out of mountain shadows into the first breaks of morning light.  These paintings outwardly express the inner life of a man who looks upon our world and deeply loves what he sees.     
--Alex Alviar


Photos by Janet McGahan and Marti de Alva

To see more artwork, go to jerrymcgahan.com