Tucson Weekly: Small World (July 1 - July 7, 1999) tucsonweekly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tucsonweekly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Longtime Artist Friends Finally Stage A Group Show At Davis Dominguez Gallery.
By Margaret Regan
FOLLOW THE ROCKS in the new
Mini Blockbuster show
at Davis Dominguez Gallery. If you read them right, they tell
the story of a longtime relationship among three pioneering artists
up at Oracle s Rancho Linda Vista. James G. Davis has painted a big gray boulder set against a blue-green
landscape in Friends, an oil on paper. The rock is
the backdrop for two men affectionately posing arm in arm. You ll
find the same rock, a half-circle flattened out on the bottom,
in Bruce McGrew s Colorado Pond, an oil on canvas.
Below the slopes of the Catalinas north face, the Bachman Wash twists its way through thickets of mesquite and creosote. Given a German name loosely translated as man by the brook, the beloved wash snakes through the Rancho Linda Vista artist colony in Oracle. It s an arroyo both sandy and rocky, and it changes with the seasons. Sometimes it s a raging creek, sometimes a bed of wildflowers, sometimes a parched and desperate gulch. For 38 years, from 1968, when the ranch got started, to 1999 when he died, painter Bruce McGrew lived just a few steps away. He was deeply attached to a distinctive bend in the wash, and he painted it again and again.