“Creature Features” is the title of the current show on display at the Palmer Gallery in Main Building— a survey of visual artist Sean McCarthy’s work across illustration, painting and comics.
“Creatures” is perhaps a vague word, but McCarthy’s works resist easy description. The figures he paints are monstrous hybrids of animals, full of drooping and bulging flesh, scales and fur; the syntax and form of biology have been taken to the extreme, far beyond our ability to categorize or even understand them.
In a gallery talk on Sept. 20, McCarthy spoke of a range of influences both including and transcending the art-historical canon. His earliest works on display, for example, are graphite-and-ink drawings of demons inspired by the 17th-century grimoire “The Lesser Key of Solomon.” Beyond simply playing to a fascination with the occult, the demon drawings are intricate and vibrantly imaginative, fragments of worlds unknown. The figures— “Andrealphalus,” a four-eyed, drooling donkey with the wings and feathers of a peacock, or “Uvall,” a wizened, twisted dromedary that peers from behind drooping eyelids— are more unsettling than scary. Drawn on paper that could fit in a notebook, they whisper rather than shout, full of detail that goes unappreciated from more than a few feet away. Other earlier works on display share the same visual language but to looser ends, recalling surrealist automatic drawings or the biomorphic abstractions of artists like Arshile Gorky.
Each of his paintings was conceived initially from a list of animal combinations— “mammal/fish/bird,” say, or “reptile/amphibian/insect”—and transfigured eventually into a singular being. The process is more reincorporation than assemblage, though—not a horse with the head of an eagle and the tail of a scorpion, but an eagle and a horse and a scorpion all thrown into a blender. The result is garbled, grotesque and yet entirely whole—each being with its own sense of itself, unique, strangely elegant. They peer at you from a distance, daring you to look back. They are by turns furry, scaled, fleshy and bulbous, with appendages, beaks and claws entirely out of proportion. These animals have been so wholly reconstituted that it is hard to figure out what went into them, leaving each as an individual, stripped of any history or reason for being, just there. The backgrounds of these paintings, when visible, are plain, flat deserts, leaving each work entirely self-contained. Nothing is to be seen but the monster, or sometimes multiple, as in “Drone Swarm,” where little lizard-fish attack a hulking, helpless musk ox-slash-scorpion, or “Reach,” where a white-woolen, winged, beaked creature gets its tusk caught by the tongue of a pig-goblin with giant, stumpy legs. They are highly textured: Flesh mounds and undulating, scaled protrusions are rendered in detailed ink work. The feeling here is of the naturalist’s illustration, the kind of thing you would see in a field guide or natural history textbook. McCarthy described his attentiveness to the physical nature of his pigments in acrylic, adding further to the creatures’ sense of life.
Pushed right up against the edges of their canvases, it is as if these creatures are caged by them, paraded in front of the viewer as oddities in a sideshow attraction. They feel part of the human tradition of natural conquest, of taxonomy, but they defy easy categorization. We have no idea what we are looking at. The creatures’ eyes jumped out to me, though—pleading, pondering, windows to some kind of soul.
“Creature Features” also showcases some of McCarthy’s more recent work—the risograph-printed zine “The Novice” and its sequel, which take the visual language of his paintings and strip them down to contour lines and blocks of solid color. On display at the Palmer Gallery are some original blue-pencil sketches, evidence of the hand of the creator. “I like the work of the art to tell me something about its making,” McCarthy says. Pencil lines, evidence of the early process, are everywhere in his work.
Despite its subject matter, McCarthy’s work feels deeply human. These beings look back at us as reflections of ourselves, as things worthy of empathy and intersubjective understanding. They pose and bulge in submission, like elephants paraded in front of circus crowds. In “Introspection,” an acrylic painting in the back corner of the room, a fuzzy-alien-insectoid being with arms like ginger roots looks blankly outwards, wilted in on itself, pondering. You wonder what it is thinking about, if its garbled existence makes more sense to itself than it does to us.
In his gallery talk, McCarthy described his fascination with the inherent tension of things that do not quite fit together, where the words we apply to our world fall flat. It is hard to categorize or describe anything that McCarthy draws, except in vague hyphenated conglomerates or with words like “grotesque” or “creature.” In lieu of understanding, McCarthy just asks you to look, and to feel.
“Creature Features” will be on display at the Palmer Gallery in Main Building through Oct.12, 2025.