Paul McMahon

I remember this drawing and opening event and the non-gallery but nice white wall environment. It was my first day in Boston and I had the good fortune of meeting someone (Paul) who I have admired all my life. I already knew of and loved the Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt and was kind of mystified by a set of rules that would be a drawing.

Alex. Grey

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“Paul is the troubadour king of Woodstock, N.Y., highly honored, highly respected. Seen as one of the true practitioners of all that’s correct about life and art.”

-Linda Mary Montano

“…the genre-bending Woodstock-based songwriter…Paul McMahon is a bad**s m**********r… “

-John Burdick. Hudson Valley Almanac

"Paul is one of the creative lights in the Woodstock, NY community of artists and musicians. His life is his art.

Marc Black

Paul is one of a kind! He is a true wordsmith poet with soft sweetness and divine musical abilities . His appeal is famous and his music brings me to places and spaces of beauty sadness joy and irony. May there always be more Paul M's to light up the world.

Jesse Scherer LMT

The people / had gone to school with who moved to New York all lived within a 10 block radius of each other, so basically I hung out with them. Whether we constituted an artistic alliance, I'm not really sure. But the galvanizing member of this unusual club was someone who hadn't gone to CalArts, and that was Paul McMahon. Paul became Helene's (Winer) Associate Director. Paul was the one with the day job. I don't know if he made anything happen. And I don't mean any of this in terms of the worldly sense -it was all very private. But he did make people realize they had some kind of collective identity. I wasn't in the Pictures exhibition. That was much later and seemed like another era. The whole thing was straining to make a conflict. Again, Paul was the central person in this. It wasn't a club, it wasn't a school, it wasn't anything really, just a bunch of friends. Paul wasn't in the show either...

Pictures was all really ephemeral, it was never meant to last and didn't last, not really. The key intelligence here was always Paul McMahon, and the keynote of Paul McMahon, as an art critic, was humor. He was essentially a postmodern comedian.

-DAVID SALLE, excerpted from 5000 ARTISTS RETURN TO ARTISTS SPACE:25 YEARS, 1998

Reviews

I always felt YOU NOT Sonic Youth were the real ‘downtown Beatles’ and this tape proved it!”

Paul's musical wizardry combines insights worthy of Dylan with the vocal charm of Willie Nelson and the eclecticism of the Beatles. Paul has written some of the most beautiful love songs of our times and he can sing them with tenderness, passion and humor. He is simply one of my favorite singers and

Disguised as a spaced out hippie, Paul McMahon reorders American logic through visual art, bumperstickers, and song.”

og psychadelic wizard man”

One of the advance scouts for benevolent civilization of extraterrestrial artists that is planning to settle on Planet Earth, sometime after Donald Trump is defeated.”