Alumna prepares open studio retrospective honoring late art teacher Steve McCue

Artist Alexandra Conway grew up in Saratoga. Attending both Redwood Middle School and SHS, Conway graduated in 2006. Her passion for painting sparked during high school under the guidance of late art teacher, Steve McCue.

After a one-year battle with a rare form of lung cancer unrelated to smoking, McCue passed away on Jan. 4.

In tribute to McCue and his influence, Conway will be displaying her art at her parent’s home in Saratoga on May 18 as part of the Silicon Valley Open Studios Foundation, a program that gives rising artists a chance to showcase their work.  

Many of the pieces she will be showing are from her high school classes with McCue. 

“His program and the way he structured his classes made me try a lot of different things,” Conway said.

She said the different styles she learned to use in high school helped her by getting her out of her comfort zone.

“He made art more interactive rather than trying to be perfect all the time, which I really liked,” she said.

After high school, McCue advised Conway to apply and attend UC Santa Cruz as a film major. However, she she soon realized that she missed painting and decided to major in art as well.

“I ended up falling in love with the department,” Conway said. “And I absolutely loved being able to be in an art class for four hours at a time and do nothing but listen to music and paint and make a big mess.”

She said the art classes at UCSC were extremely different from her classes in high school.

“Mr. McCue was super clean and super neat and everything had to be wiped down and scrubbed clean,” Conway said.

During her classes at UCSC, however, Conway said she was able to “throw around paint” and work on only art for hours at a time.

From art classes both in high school and college, Conway said that she has developed a distinct style of painting.

“Most of my paintings  are autobiographies,” Conway said, “A lot of my pieces in the past have been about nature and our relationship to nature.”

According to Conway, the her studio show is a way for different artists and art enthusiasts to communicate about “what we do and why we do what we do.”

Conway plans on displaying all of her artwork since high school.

“After [McCue’s] passing, there was the motivation for me to turn my show into a retrospective,” Conway said.  “What I’ve decided to do is to look through my past, to see where I started off and where I am [now].”

 

People who are interested in attending her Open Studio can find a brochure on http://www.svos.org/, and use the maps on the brochure to check out different open studios all over the area.