My good friend and fellow gallery owner Janice Elkins had been telling me for weeks about this artist she had met while taking a senior citizens' pottery class. She had decided to include him in her holiday group show and was giving him the largest wall to show his work. I was thinking that's a little risky, from a senior citizens' art class? A few days before the opening, I dropped by for our weekly tête-à-tête. As I walked in, I got that wow feeling that comes when I see work that is truly wonderful. Howard McClain had hung his paintings on the largest wall in Janice's gallery and I fell in love.

                The paintings are clearly executed by someone who has not attended art school but they ARE by an artist who is familiar with naïve work and has embraced the genre. The

Anniversary Dinner, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 20 X 16

pieces capture scenes and people from "back in the day" that are authentic and often gently humorous, resonating emotionally to a broad audience. "Our Anniversary Dinner" is one that brought back a flood of happy memories of my husband Noel and me when we

                Many of McClain's paintings depict singers and musicians in both secular and sacred settings. In one of them he paints a musician on stage strumming a

It Is Well with My Soul, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 24 X 18

shocking pink guitar accompanied by a frenetic piano player and teens rocking to the music in front. The painting is alive with rhythm. He gets the details right from the cord linking the guitar to the amplifier to the suggestion of a snappy dinner jacket on the performer, right out of the late 50's and early 60's. There is nothing extraneous in the painting. One of my favorites is McClain's rendition of a church service where the choir is singing the hymn "It Is Well with My Soul." Again he has kept the details to a minimum but all the essentials are there - the women's hats, the piano player, the soloists, the suggestion of a larger choir and the raised arms of the preacher/choir director and a woman in the congregation. They all combine to make a kind of pyramid of power that points to the cross suspended in the background from a carefully rendered chain - a power cord to the Big Amplifier, if you will.

                The best painting in the show was "Aunt Mary's Holy House." The centerpiece is the house rendered in stripes of color like Joseph and his coat of many colors. We see

Aunt Mary's Holy House, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 24 X 18

presumably Aunt Mary energetically stepping off the porch pail in hand and apparently heading toward a shack in the background with the word "Out" written on it. In the lower right hand corner of the foreground is a wonderful rendition of a pig with attitude. It's just a great juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane. McClain reinforces this with the cross at the top of the holy house and the cross formed by the window panes on the lower right above the porch.

                Howard McClain spent fifty years conducting choirs and sixty-nine years singing first with his family and later with various gospel groups. In 2004 he and the Resurrection United Methodist Church choir traveled to Italy to participate in a music festival in Rome. He has retired from performing and directing music and is now focused on turning his memories into visual representations. McClain has made a three-dimensional model of his aunt's holy house which is almost as wonderful as the painting, but I've run out of room in my house so I'll have to settle for the painting.

                Howard McClain's work may be purchased through Gallery Pink, jfeart@gmail.com, 149 Harrison Street, Oak Park, IL 60304, 708-648-3131.

Me and Howard McClain, December 2012

Laurie Beasley, owner, Ridge Art