Lofty pursuit

A series of tragic family circumstances put McCullough to work at age 11 on a newspaper route, providing much-needed income for his single mom who eventually succumbed to a terminal bout with breast cancer. At 16 he got off his bike and landed an apprenticeship with the Springfield Daily News in its commercial art department. All along he was interested in attending fine-art school, but when he couldn't get in, he ended up in the Naval Reserves and commercial art school at Boston University of Art. "It was like a trade school," he says, "but what I got was a direct relationship with the teachers who encouraged me in illustration." On his own, McCullough took advanced mathematics at MIT and began to see the possibilities for mathematical applications in art. "Something magical happened," he says. "I was treating it like artistic composition. I got caught up in that, and I still use geometry in my art today."

The Vietnam War interfered with McCullough's ongoing quest to get into a fine-art school, yet he credits it with bringing about his artistic epiphany. Though called up for active duty, he didn't have to go to Vietnam and instead served stateside in an orthopedic hospital outside Chicago as a medic treating the wounded. "I was surrounded by people my own age all mutilated. I was learning surgical dressing changes, and that was one of the single most important things that ever happened to me," he says. McCullough remembers thinking of George Segal's work in plaster body casting as he put real people in body casts. He would take home rolls of plaster casting material and sculpt with it in his bedroom. "I would dip them and pretend I had to do this wrapping of my sculptures in a certain amount of time, like I had to do with a real guy," he says. "The material heats up and is pliable for a short time before it hardens. Then I would paint these sculpture forms with acrylics."

After his discharge, McCullough journeyed around the country, living in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Kansas, and Texas. He met Bob "Daddy-o" Wade in Cedar Hill, and through another series of coincidences, ended up renting a large warehouse loft in Fair Park with artists he says single-handedly started the Deep Ellum scene. "Richard Childers, Richard Tuttle, George Goodenow, and later Frank X. Tolbert and Susan Walton decided to collaborate on the first project," McCullough says. "It was cooperative living in a collaborative space on First Avenue." McCullough says the collaboration was like 500X Gallery before 500X, and the small group structured what became known as the art scene of Deep Ellum. In 1978, "I showed David Bates and James Surls in my studio next door at the corner of Expo and Parry."

Since 1980, McCullough has made a living as a working artist, experimenting with performance art, music-inspired "Tone Poems," and "Baggie Burial Rituals" involving burying canvas in rural East Texas with plastic sandwich bags loaded with paint and water. Sand painting was an accidental discovery, when his resurrected canvases were spread on the roof of the Deep Ellum art warehouse to dry, held down with bags of sand. "I noticed this granular, climatic thing going on," he says, "and the logical thing, I thought, was to glue colored sand onto the canvas. It became an alchemical performance thing."

Sand and glass figure in his work today, as do the geometry, plaster, and acrylic paints he's experimented with over 20 years. "I've never not worked in all these mediums," he says. "I'm just exploring my ideas that I have about life." And he's pushing those ideas to anyone who'll listen in the lobby of Continental Lofts. "I'm just shooting it out there," he says. "That's the way I live. Gallery people won't touch it, but I think that has to do with selling art. If they don't get it, they think they can't sell it...But people come through here and say, 'Wow, I got that.' That's all that's important."

A work-worn woman comes through the lobby door, heading upstairs for home. "Hey," she says, brightening when she spots McCullough bent over his sketchbook. "I met you at the opening and I talked to you about that part in the poem about bridging the gap between poetry and painting." McCullough springs to life, embracing the woman without touching her, as if he has just discovered another "soul mate." "I remember," he says, and he actually does remember. "We talked about the metaphor of the sacredness of the earth and the materials I use in my work." She nods, saying that reading the words helped her relate to the visual images. "I hope things connect up when you read between the lines," McCullough says. "I could talk about this all night."

And no doubt he would, but the woman doesn't give him the chance. She says a quick good-bye and heads upstairs to the relative quiet of her loft.