Painter Jim McGinley dances to his own tune

By TOM KANE

MILANVILLE, PA — When oil painter Jim McGinley of Milanville painted in the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, he was out. Abstract impressionism was in. But that didn’t bother McGinley, who was born in New Jersey and lived there for many years before moving to the Delaware River Valley.

“I paid no attention to all the ‘isms’ that were flying around back then,” he said. “Like cubism, impressionism, pointalism, modernism, postmodernism and abstract expressionism. I just kept painting the way I wanted to.”

McGinley, who admits that he is a pig-headed Irishman who spurns the crowd, is what you call a tradition landscape painter. If he had an “ism,” it would be realism. He paints landscapes, still-lifes, portraits and, lately, water spilling over rocks at the bottom of a stream.

“I dance to nobody else’s tune but my own,” he said. “Nobody dances like I do, and that has made all the difference in my career.”

McGinley said that he has been painting for about 50 years.

“I’m an old guy and I have had a lot of life experience to draw on in my painting,” he said.

Good art is not just painting pretty pictures.

“These young painters who are coming out of art school don’t know much,” he said. “They haven’t had a lot of life experience—good and bad—to paint about. I don’t think it’s good for a painter to be too successful when he or she is young. You get locked into a style and are afraid to change and try new things. I know a lot of painters that had that happen to them and they just faded out because their work stayed the same and got boring.”

Where he was content to be on the outs with the art critics, now he is very much “in.”

“Traditional painting is in now,” he said. “It’s huge. People got tired of ugly paintings. Broken dinner plates plastered on a canvas. Grotesque images that leap out at you off the wall. Abstract images that didn’t make sense. That’s mostly gone now. Or at least, it’s losing the attention of art collectors and new gallery owners.”

The trend is to get back to good painting,” he said. “No junk. No ugly stuff. No painting that is, as they called it, ‘tough.’”

Painting that was tough was supposed to challenge your intellect.

“All it did was repel, and it couldn’t last,” he said.

McGinley is critical of the New York City art scene. “They’re playing it safe,” he said. “They’re not interested in change or new trends. There’s too much at stake. They are in business and their gallery spaces are expensive, so they become very conservative. Young up-coming painters are not going to New York. What is going to happen there is what happened in Paris many years ago. Paris lost its nerve and scared away the new art. That’s happening in New York, I think.”

McGinley’s painting are in many famous museum collections and galleries. Some of the big corporations that have his work in their collections are AT&T, Bell Labs, Warner Lambert Pharmaceutical and Mutual Insurance.

The painting on this week’s Celebrations cover is an oil of a scene in Mileses, NY. “It’s a snow scene and it reminds me of Christmas. That’s why I selected it to accompany The River Reporter’s Celebrations section. It shows how beautiful it is around here in Pennsylvania and New York along the Delaware. I never tire of painting local scenes. Down in New Jersey, I got bored as the area developed. There are endless opportunities here to paint. I drive down a road and I see a scene and I want to paint it. It happens all the time.”

McGinley is an animal lover. He has a number of Palomino quarter horses on his farm along the banks of the Delaware. His favorite charity, to which he will donate the money from the sale of this painting, is the SPCA Animal Center in Rock Hill, NY.

“Several of the staff there are my friends, so I want to support what they are doing,” he said. “They’ve had some hard times there trying to keep the center open and they work hard. What they are doing for animals is important work.

The painting shown here will be on display for auction at Narrowsburg Roasters on Main Street in Narrowsburg, NY with the other artworks appearing on the cover of our holiday Celebrations section.

Anyone interested in visiting McGinley’s studio on the river can reach him at 570/729 1413.