As our world turns and burns, artists continue to propose visionary realms beyond our own. Coming upon Michael McGrath’s “Under Panther Mountain” (through January 25) at Headstone in Kingston, his second solo show with the gallery, is a welcomed leap into a quasi-fantasy land, where everything hovers elegantly within a neon-tinted dimension of tranquility despite the impending chaos of bubbling volcanos and plunging meteors. Featuring over 20 new works that captivate and charm, McGrath’s work is equally soul-soothing as it is mysterious.
McGrath tinkers with a series of enchanting icon-archetypes that surface and re-surface in fairytale-like combinations, including nose-diving ravens, happy dragonflies, floating faces, glaring third eyes, and cozy little houses. How these symbols play out in each work is precisely their allure, and McGrath takes us by the hand into his endearing domains. In Old warning systems, Olive 1890 (2025), a burning white bowl gives off a plume of smoke that rises upward and the ground below hums with a mélange of bright flora as a woman and cat drift weightlessly in the middle, while Acorn harvest (2025) features two figures heading toward a cluster of dwellings as little white orbs twinkle above—these works transfix and spark the psyche.
A smaller misty painting titled Meteor garden, dusk (2025) recalls the sentiment in Wordsworth’s poem “The Recluse,” where the poet lays us down on a mossy patch to remind us of mortal separation (“With paradise before me, here to die”). Indeed, McGrath gives us a private patch of yellow earth and a place to rest. Meteor garden, late float (2025) looks like a page pulled from The Little Prince as a solitary figure faces a mighty mountain and empty landscape, and Quiet exchange, attempt two (2025) is another moment of lovely loneliness, this time between a figure and an ebony horse connected by a pink arc against a fuzzy field.
As I made my way around the room from one dreamy vignette to the next, the consistent presence of a woman from behind and the stoic silhouette of a black cat suggested a curious sub-plot with respect to themes that reverberate throughout art history, in this case the gaze. With Manet’s contested and celebrated Olympia (1863), for example, we come upon the naked female subject and her attendant as a black cat stands at the edge of the bed—femme and feline greet our eyes with unflinching focus, effectively forcing us to look inward (some theorists argue this is the precise moment that art becomes postmodern in its dramatization of human consciousness by way of the gaze).
In McGrath’s universe, ladies and kitties alike have their back to us as we all gaze together toward swirling pink skies in a realm that is both here and beyond, and Afterlight, Panther Mountain (2025) is a glorious vision of this. In this painting, McGrath has orchestrated all his favorite motifs into a wild scene where everything is happening at once—crows dive toward the earth, black cats wander, figures face a volcano that erupts, all of it a delightful chaos. With the daily onslaught of global traumas knocking us off our axis, McGrath invites us into a place of magic that glows with lambent-colored futuristic excitement. Despite the certain solace within these works, McGrath reveals his secrets through painterly affection and grace.
