If Doug McCoy has his way, the people who view his drawings won’t just be in awe of their intricately wrought detail, they’ll leave the gallery with ink on the tips of their nose.
“Hopefully, there’ll be a piece they’ll lean in really close to see,” the 47-year-old Chattanooga-based artist says. “That’s what I enjoy, when people lean in a little closer.
“It breaks my artist’s heart when someone can just walk by a painting at top speed. You think, ‘Oh man, there went four weeks of my life.'”
McCoy’s drawings are defined by an almost dizzying degree of minute details. Science fiction-esque towers bristle with antennae, gears and circuit board-like components. Fantastic titans appear to stride across landscapes but are composed, upon closer inspection, of hundreds of individual bodies clinging to one another.
For eight years, McCoy has been a member artist at In-Town Gallery, where his mixed-media works of pen-and-ink and acrylic paint will be featured during September. It marks his third exhibition in the Frazier Avenue venue.