The following bio was written by C.K. Williams and is reproduced here with his generous permission:

Bruce McGrew's Paintings are very much as he himself was: physically and morally forceful, and at the same time vibrantly sensitive; direct, immediately available, yet rich with subtly and depth; and above all they’re wonderfully luminous, just as Bruce was: anyone who new Bruce I’m sure remembers the sense when you were with him of being somehow in a larger light.

The actual light of the world of course engrossed Bruce in his work, and his meditation on light and space compelled many of his paintings’ formal complexities. “Space that retreats, light that advances, and a third mysterious thing that happens between them,” is the way he characterized one of the guiding intentions of his later work. But though this third, unnamable thing certainly does come to pass in those paintings, something like it exists in his work over the entire course of his career. The incorporation of light, in both the oils and watercolors, is always daring, delicate and at the same time intensely and self-consciously dramatic, and it always effects a profound transfiguration of the ordinary.  As his work matured, there was an ever increasing audacity in his use of color, and arising from that an ever more expansive embodiment of light, and of the space the light entailed. The reality in these paintings seems constantly in motion; form and figure emit a terrifically immediate presence, and in the landscapes even pure sky becomes conceptually intricate, and sensually vast.

So much skill, so much concentration of thought and emotion, so much love of life and art. That all these were so effortlessly a part of Bruce’s character and are clearly evident in his work surely has much to do with his paintings’ enthralling sense of presence, of the feeling they impart of a uniquely passionate spirit, and of a rigorous and uncompromising aesthetic vision.

 

"Watercolor - the joy of making marks" – A selection of stream of consciousness quotes from her father's notebooks. Compiled by Shelley McGrew:

"Let light pass through from vector's of light - passage avenues"

"Line in watercolor must carry light or it is drawn, not painted"

"Watercolor: Transparent paper sheet of light - veils of color - mark making - sense of touch, lift off, release"

"A color unique to its shape doesn't have a color genealogy with 
other color shapes in the painting but is responding to the same 
source of light"

"Watercolor: Working with edges for clarity - focus – control -  Watch the shape - pull dry - know when another shape could be put next to it without bleeding the edges -
drying time can make it soft or hard. The surface and type of paper - air temperature - align medium and your physical space."

"Notice how color dries on different papers. Do a painting based on the quality of light of the dried color. If paint won't pull and puddles - add more pigment - feel the brush tug at the paint. Touch!"

Bruce McGrew, 1937-1999