Greensburg artist's whimsical works are displayed near and far

You've probably seen local artist Brian McCall's whimsical and wonderful polystyrene and papier-mache sculptures, whether you know it or not. The giant tubes of paint outside the Greensburg Art Center are his work. A piece is mounted above the door of DV8 Espresso Bar and Gallery and there's another in Oliver's Pourhouse. Look around and you'll find others.

The versatile McCall works in various media: see his Flickr page for examples of watercolors, animation, cartooning and more. Even his Greensburg home and studio, a former church at Tremont and Highland avenues, reflects his artist sensibilities, with brightly painted window frames and objets d'art in the yard.

Question: Your work is so varied. What drives that?

Answer: I think life is a dance. You just have to keep moving and twirling. I'll have a sculpture going, then when I get tired of that, I'll do a watercolor for a couple of hours. Then I'll get tired of that and I'll go back and work on the sculpture.

I have this obvious psychological problem with success. I can't stand it. Just when I'm starting to do stuff that's getting recognition, I go, I don't think I want to do that anymore.

Q: Do you have any favorites among your pieces?

A: I just put up a whole wall of sculpture at the Children's Museum (of Pittsburgh), all animals. It seems pretty popular. I'm pretty proud of that.

There are 12 pieces. I wrote a little poem to go with it. There's a pangolin, a fish, an elephant, a hippo, a mongoose, two giraffes, baby and mother — how many is that? PJ Zimmerlink, who is their curator now, came over one day and said, “We have a wall. Would you be interested in doing something for it?” I just happened to have six or seven already done, because I was thinking of having some in the show in Pittsburgh. I said, yeah, I do have some animals.

So I had to give up all my animals and make a few more. But it was worth it.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I think I'm in a period of “pretty.” I'm doing these watercolors that are fairly dynamic. I have a show coming up in Pittsburgh in April at Gallerie Chiz and I have a show right now in York at Ironic, that's a gallery-coffee shop. It's all York buildings and industry. I've always enjoyed doing buildings. Normally I tend to orient around people and faces and gestures, but there's something I like about signage.

Q: Does the humor in your work reflect your world view?

A: I would like (my work) to be a social commentary, and that ends up being expressed in humor. For some reason, most of my work has that side of caricature and humor in it. I love political cartoons and I actually know more of those types of artists than other types of artists.

Q: Speaking of that, I saw an intriguing cartoon on your Flickr page, “How the World Will End.” Can you describe it?

A: That's from my period of doing animation. I had this great big project and it all fell through, and I owed way too much money for all the stuff I had bought to do it. It (angered me) so much to just be suddenly in the doldrums, the bottom of the barrel.

So in “How the World Will End,” basically the world is destroyed and all the gods and Beelzebub _ you know, Satan — they all get together and are trying to lay blame on someone. Everybody blames the devil and he says, “Hey, it wasn't me. I had nothing to do with this.” It ends up that the only one left to blame is Everyman, and he says, “It was me, yeah. I didn't have anything else to do that day.”

I think we're probably going that way, with the nature of violence and war. Science has brought us to the brink, at least in terms of weaponry. We haven't come to terms with it in any way yet.

Shirley McMarlin is a Tribune-Review staff writer.

Reach her at 724-836-5750 or smcmarlin@tribweb.com.