Joining this authentic selection of subject matter is an almost-puritanical refusal to cut corners in creating the finished artwork. He condemns the use of cameras in preparation for a painting. This is partly because of its monocular distortions, and partly because it feels more valid to him to stand before a canvas and create an honest, personal account of nature.  He admits that drawings from sight may be imperfect, but that the imperfections are scars he wears with pride, evidence that his record is a genuine one.

The athlete in McGurl enjoys the challenge of setting out to capture particularly difficult visual phenomena in nature. When he succeeds in re-creating his experience on the canvas, the gratification is real. He likens it to climbing a mountain as opposed to driving the top. “If you know the mountain,” he affirms, “you can feel it in the soreness of your muscles.”

McGurl’s paintings portray his fascination with the dynamic natural world. He is conscious of the latent energy within elements in nature, and aware of the forces shaping their relationship to one another. He has developed a deliberate method of paint application, with areas of sgraffito, impasto, and glazing, helping to convey this sense of relative movement. Variations in surface and the arrangement of closely related color values produce a flickering, changing light that mimics the way human eyes perceive visual information. McGurl’s version of nature is one with striking aesthetic and emotional power. He draws viewers directly into the scene he observes and invites them to share in what he was feeling when he made the painting.

Joseph McGurl's paintings have been included in museum and commercial exhibitions from Boston and New York to San Francisco. He has had retrospective solo shows at the Cape Museum of Fine Arts, The Cahoon Museum of American Art, and the Saint Botolph Club of Boston. He is a Fellow with the American Society of Marine Artists and has won the John Singleton Copley Award from the Copley Society of Boston; and the Grumbacher Gold Medallion from the Guild of Boston Artists. He has been featured in American Artist, American Art Collector, Fine Art Connoisseur, Art Ideas, M. Stephen Doherty's book, Creative Oil Painting; in Driscoll and Skolnick, The Artist and the American Landscape; and in Harris and Lyon, Art of the State: Massachusetts.

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