Painting With Fire
Jay McCafferty Burning Holes in Modern Art
By James Preston Allen, Publisher

     Those who have grown up in San Pedro and know Jay McCafferty think of him as the onetime Cabrillo Beach lifeguard who found his way into teaching art at Los Angeles Harbor College. Most of them don’t know much beyond this, except that he lives in one of the most unique, if not modern pieces of architecture constructed in the harbor area since the Warner Grand Theater was built in the 1930s.
     Jay is an extremely private and quite unassuming kind of guy. He has a head full of burning ideas which placed him in the enviable position of being a recognized West Coast artist on the national art scene since graduating from UC Irvine and winning the prestigious Young Talent Award at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over 30 years ago.
     On any given day, when the sun is shining, McCafferty steals away to the rooftop of his studio/loft overlooking the Port’s Main Channel and raises an odd looking magnifying lens above scraps of paper, now cardboard, burning holes in the pieces in a distinctive, grid-like fashion. The magnifying glass looks like something you’d find at a garage sale, or a prop in the film A Series of Unfortunate Events, but it does the job just fine, and the artist at his work thinks of this like a meditation: the Zen of burning holes in the visual plane of modern art. Some would think it quite strange— but there is a mysterious method to his creativity.
     His new work, currently on display at Gallery 478/Carafano Studio, (on 7th St. next to Marcello’s Tuscany Room restuarant) is an extension of McCafferty’s pursuit of burning holes in the artistic grid. Appearing like large pieces of a not-yet-completed jigsaw puzzle, or fragments of an ancient fabric, they hover on the walls with subtle vibrancy as if scattered by the wind or by accident. But this artist believes that “there are no accidents” particularly when it comes to making art.
     He explains, “Here’s something that I’ve come to the conclusion—there’s no such thing as an accident and because everything is right now, and if everything is right now, it has to be.”
     McCafferty explains this in the context of once having to put out an accidental fire while burning holes in a 60-by-30 foot piece of canvas commissioned by the LA County Museum of Art. At first he thought the fire destroyed the work. Only later did he realize that this “accident” was just what that piece needed.
     Recently, during a trip to Africa, McCafferty made an odd discovery—cardboard with printed images on them.
     “We were out looking at animals all day long. And I would come back to the camp and I’d look in the trash and find cardboard, and I’d find an image on one that I’d like,” he explained. “This is really interesting, cardboard is ubiquitous, it’s everywhere and when I did this first series I went and bought the cardboard.”
     Now after the safari, he hunts cardboard— in part because of its underlying geometry, in part fascinated by the common banal pop imagery printed on the boxes. He “skins” these trophies and hangs them up like a jaguar would hang its kill in a tree on the savanna. Then he carves out the parts he likes and discards the rest to the hyenas of the recycling bin. Only later does he burn and color them in a primal modernist style that evokes both a visceral and traditional art sense.
     “Since I started using cardboard I started using sand to put out the flame, so essentially it’s a very simple idea but one that a layman can understand,” He says. The work is essentially about mapping on the grid-like graph paper, or like a sailor plotting a course on a chart—only the destination is not foretold and the continents obscured. In the process the grid is destroyed, the landmasses burned are revealed, then organized.
     “I don’t really draw the grid, I just have done it so many times I can get close,” he explains. “It’s like this mysterious thing that I can concentrate my focus, my energy and brain in one spot… so essentially, I learned this from a lot of doing.”

It All Started with One Class

     Yet, McCafferty would not be where he is today if it had not been for taking one class at Los Angeles Harbor College from Paul Balles.
     Years later McCafferty recalls, “We had a conversation about one of the moments (back in college)… I told him how important he was to me, it was sort of one of those confessions.”
     Jay McCafferty grew up like any normal Pedro kid. He went to the high school, swam on the school team, was even considered cool enough to be invited to the private club parties held on 6th and Beacon streets, before the bulldozers razed the heart of old San Pedro.
     He was just a regular guy, until “I got in college, I started taking classes, I realized intuitively that my mind was a sort of backwards. Education justified my intuitive beliefs,” he explained.
     “I think that you are born into a club when you are an artist. When you run into somebody, you can just kind of tell. And so I think it’s a genetic coding, just as a baseball player can throw a baseball.”
     The late 1950s and early ‘60s was a time of the earlier generations of artists. The Beats, had discovered Pedro’s old downtown and began producing underground art and music; coexisting with the sailors in the bars, brothels, and pawn shops.
      One group of these artists opened the Exiles Gallery just across from where Senfuku Restaurant is today (where Jay would later set up one of his first studios). Down Sixth Street was the infamous Golden Ass coffeehouse.
      “I used to sneak away at night and come down to the Beatniks’ house,” McCafferty says. “It was so mysterious that you got the sense that there was something going on there. Probably a marijuana buzz, that I didn’t even know about at the time.”
     Beacon Street was the “bad part of town” and as McCafferty recalls, “Even the police didn’t want to come down there.” This reputation has hung on to this part of the city like gum on the sidewalk, even though things have changed remarkably. It still has the mystique of Bohemian nights and a stone-hard aesthetic that won’t die or let go.
     McCafferty did let go, for a while at least. He attended the International College Afloat, a college campus on a ship; traveling the world and discovering that his Pedro reality and street smarts gave him an edge associating with the “upper crust” kids.
     He says, “the intuitive and the street stuff really plays into the real world, but you need to get some other set of tools to make it work.”
     He found himself avoiding the Vietnam War like so many others of his age, and going to UC Irvine where he discovered, “All the poetic feelings I have,” which couldn’t be expressed growing up here in the solid working class ethics of longshoremen and fish canneries.
      But he came back and began his life’s work, burning holes in the tradition of modern art, graduating with a MFA degree and receiving the prestigious New Talent award from LACMA in his early years, and continuing a sustaining career for the last 30 years.
     Yet through all of these years of success and then teaching at LA Harbor College, it’s as if some part of his personal puzzle, inside, was missing. He now finds this missing piece in the re-emerging art scene amongst a few trusted artists whom he respects and understands. He says, “I never thought this would happen here, to be honest with you.”
     The emerging gallery scene (like Gallery 478) in San Pedro reminds him of the famous Alfred Stiegliztz Gallery 291 in New York in 1905 where it wasn’t about selling anything, “There is a purity about what’s happening here. It’s not about selling, it’s about quality,” the artists explains. “It starts very small, but two people can make an army sometimes.”
     The current show at Gallery 478, curated by artist Ron Linden is an expression of McCafferty’s newfound idealism that Pedro has a future beyond the shipping containers and longshoring.
     “Linden,” he says, “has one of the best brains of my generation and he is a real good friend. I didn’t think I’d ever have that kind of bonding in this city.”
     So as San Pedro’s post-Bohemian art scene evolves, it is likely that more and better artists will emerge either from the woodwork of the town itself, like McCafferty, or will be drawn here like metal shavings to a magnet.
     A lot depends on things that have nothing to do with art, and more with commerce and speculation, but as Jay pronounces, “there are two purities in art, the first is the making and the other is the viewing.” Everything outside of that is something else less mysterious.
     San Pedro faces its own dilemma: how to hold on to the part of itself that is the poetic freedom that has created the mystique of the old downtown that McCafferty remembers, while selling upscale condominium lofts at rising prices which may well destroy the essence of what makes it a unique and vibrant creative place to live.

Jay MacCafferty’s new work was exhibited at Gallery 478 in San Pedro.