Sixth Street

Thirty-three years ago, LA artist Dan McCleary moved into a studio on 6th Street just around the corner from MacArthur Park. The small storefront space has windows only on the north facing wall which allow for a single source of raking light that always illuminates his painted subjects from the left side. The cloistered stillness recalls the atmosphere of Vermeer’s paintings whose light source was almost always from windows to the left of his subjects. In this quiet environment, McCleary makes paintings of cut flowers in vases, an ephemeral subject with subtle but profound allusions to the tradition of memento mori. He regards his other still lifes of pink bakery boxes, white paper cups and sculptural nail polish bottles as “buildings,” fundamental blocks and forms that are arranged in simple groups echoing the compositional structure of Morandi and the brushwork in a Thiebaud cake. McCleary's larger works are humble scenes…