Patrick JB Flynn
“Gone Wild,” a new exhibit at the James Watrous Gallery in the Overture Center, spotlights one of the city’s most talented and lauded artists and illustrators, the late David McLimans.
“David’s show is a celebration, not a memorial,” says Patrick JB Flynn, a fellow artist and close friend of McLimans. Flynn is the art director for the Cambridge, Mass.-based art and criticism magazine The Baffler.
The collection of McLimans’ collages, children’s books, sculpture and editorial illustrations opened at the James Watrous Gallery on July 17 and runs through Aug. 23.
In advance of the opening, I spoke with Flynn; Michael Duffy, another close friend of McLimans and a colleague from the legendary Survival Graphics collective; Watrous Gallery director Jody Clowes; and exhibits coordinator Rachel Bruya.
“David liked black humor,” says Duffy. “He had this innate curiosity, the talent to listen and observe.” The amusing and edgy aspects of his playful nature-themed imagery came from his imagination but also from being “a nature guy,” he says. “He lived in a cabin in Richland County, a kind of shack. He liked to wander. He liked fire.”
McLimans died at the age of 66 in 2014, from a heart attack. A Navy veteran, he’d been treated at the V.A. hospital in Madison, but his ongoing health issues had more to do with dental injuries from a long-ago accident than with the heart condition that took his life.
Born in Beaver Dam and raised in Green Bay, McLimans received his MFA in graphic design at Boston University after traveling extensively with the orchestras employing his then-wife, cellist Karen Cornelius. After living in Hong Kong and Vienna, the couple settled in Madison in the 1980s. Cornelius joined the Madison Symphony Orchestra in 2004, where she still performs. The couple’s now-grown daughter, Hannah McLimans, has inherited her father’s eye for composition, Flynn says, describing the striking photographs she’s been sending him from Utah, where she is completing her graduate studies.
Following a stint as a typographer at the Pleasant Company in Middleton, McLimans began his long association with Flynn and The Progressive starting in 1983. His witty and sophisticated editorial illustrations graced the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly and many other national publications. His gorgeously illustrated children’s book (and the exhibit’s namesake) Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet (2007) was recognized as a New York Times Illustrated Book of the Year and was named a Caldecott Honor Medalist.
In “Frog,” the artist cut maps with X-acto knives to create precise symmetries.
“Even these days, I’ll read an article we’ll be illustrating at The Baffler and immediately think of David and how he might have approached it,” Flynn says. “He had a singular vocabulary, and it shows across his illustrative works and into the fine art of his collages and sculptures. It’s in the ephemera he used to create his art: maps, found objects, even currency.”
Flynn previews several of the pieces that will be on exhibit, displaying the joyful breadth of McLimans’ vision. The finely wrought black ink on white illustrations, using signature elements such as curving jagged lines and masked faces, are striking in their authority and balance.
The meticulous detail in the wildly colorful collages is even more astonishing for its “subversive” (codes and clues abound, Flynn tells me) use of maps for every detail, cut with scissors and X-Acto knives to precise and exuberant symmetries.
The transformed shapes from the old maps are fixed with Sobo archival glue, which dries clear. The effect on colors is seamless, smooth — a virtuosic presentation of technical skill and magic. What emerges are faces and animals, insects and birds, reptiles and fish: life bursting forth in uncanny order, with ferocity and power. Amid the playfulness and humor of these exquisite creatures is an edgy and untamed wildness.
Bruya cites “the amazing depths and textures of the collages, in five and six layers,” as a favorite dimensional detail. “He was an amazing distiller,” Clowes says. “And he was also a kind of vaudevillian,” adds Duffy.
“So much of his style flows out of his love for typography,” Flynn says. “I think it was that essential graphic element that drove his artistic vision.”
It is fitting, then, that McLimans’ children’s book, Gone Wild, which will also be on display at the Watrous Gallery, is getting a new life after being out of print, and 10 years after winning its Caldecott Honor. In February 2016, the London-based publisher Bloomsbury will republish it as a board book — a durable format made for the youngest readers’ small, eager hands.
