Ode to George Stillman is a color mezzotint with roulette and drypoint created in September 2003 by American artist Byron McClintock. Ode to George Stillman was printed by the artist on Rives BFK heavyweight wove. This impression is pencil signed Byron, dated, and editioned 4/12. The platemark measures 9-15/16 by 11-1/4 inches.
Photographer, printmaker and painter, George Stillman was a contemporary of Byron McClintock and was a key figure in the San Francisco Abstract Expressionism scene at its height in the 1940s and '50s. Stillman was a member of the “Sausalito Six” and helped to establish the San Francisco Bay Area as a beacon of leading-edge visual creativity in a tumultuous, pivotal time. McClintock tended bar at the famous Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach during World War II, and was privy to the happenings of the local poets, musicians, and artists as the neighborhood evolved from a quiet Italian enclave to the pulse of West Coast expressionism.
McClintock’s use of roulette imbued the linework with energy and movement and added volume to the passages of color. He noted his colors were Raw Sienna mixed a transparent base and Intense Black.
Byron McClintock was born in Klamath Falls, Oregon in 1930. In 1946, he joined the Merchant Marines, sailing throughout the Pacific. He moved to San Francisco in 1949 and enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) where he studied under Edward Corbett, Richard Diebenkorn, and James Budd Dixon. During those years he served as class monitor for Dixon’s printmaking class and printed lithographs for many of the students. In the early 1950s, McClintock tended bar at Vesuvio Café, a saloon that was an important hangout for the Beat artists, and he shared a studio in the Mission District with Ernest Briggs.
McClintock served in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1955. After his discharge, he returned to San Francisco where he co-owned Acme Photoengraving, a photoengraving business specializing in commercial advertising work, until 1980. During the 1960s McClintock exhibited his paintings at the John Boles Gallery in San Francisco and, in the late 1970s, he purchased a large studio on Howard Street and bought a press to return to printmaking.
New York Abstract Expressionist print collector, Charles Dean, rediscovered Byron McClintock in the early 1990s. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased a few of McClintock’s prints and included them in their Recent Acquisitions exhibition in 2004. At Dean’s urging, McClintock traveled to New York from the Pacific Northwest to see his work hanging in the Whitney. McClintock’s work is also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
