“Then there’s Joseph McNamara who’s actually a photorealist but he was the first photorealist that I’d realized had real validity because he does the most panoramic imagery and he captures basically obsolete technology in the most poetic and perfect fashion. His works are just phenomenal in their precise detail. He’s included in the show with a most compelling painting of the Midway Sunset Oil Field, the largest oil field in CA, an amazing work of art.”
Neil Jenney interviewed on iCRV radio Sept. 2022 commenting on work exhibited at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Sept. 2022.
Excerpt from the Waterbury CT Republican-American, October 15, 2022:
It’s this brand of realism – lapidary, radiant, explicit – that hums through the exhibit. Joseph McNamara’s fastidiously painted landscapes of desert scenes, like ‘Gas Separator, Midway-Sunset Oil Field,’ choked with elaborate oil rigs and anthropomorphic gas separators, are brilliantly articulated, colorful compositions of silver-bellied kegs, coppery pipes and chewed-up lemon-yellow steel tools. McNamara’s handling of light, in particular, as it soaks the salmon desert and bounces off the donkey-like pump jacks is stellar.
© 1970-2023 Joseph McNamara