Local Real Estate Broker to Exhibit Paintings with Family

For a group of five siblings, creating works of art is a family affair.

Joe McGauley, a real estate broker from Ladue, will exhibit watercolor paintings along with works of various media by four of his seven siblings at the Old Orchard Gallery in Webster Groves. The show opens on April 29 and runs through May 7.

By day, McGauley, 51, is the senior director and principal of Gateway Commercial, a Clayton-based independent member of the international Cushman & Wakefield Alliance. He has worked there for 21 years. In his free time, however, McGauley paints realistic portraits of buildings.

"Thirty years ago, I started painting," McGauley said. "I went to the Washington University School of Architecture, and there was a retired architect who came back to teach a watercolor class, and I was kind of looking for some easy hours, so I signed up ... One day he came in and showed me all the paintings he had done around the world, and I got the bug."

Although for years McGauley has donated paintings to charity auctions benefiting the American Diabetes Association and the St. John's Hospital Foundation, this is his first for-profit exhibition.

"For the first time, I’m going to see if anybody wants to buy some of them," he said. "I've got to make sure they’re strangers because I usually give paintings to my friends."

The artist's quest for inspiration has led him to destinations as close and familiar as and and as far and exotic as Venice, Italy, where the water of the floating city reflects light onto the buildings. McGauley prefers to take plenty of pictures and then commence painting at home rather than setting up an easel on location.

"It’s a distraction and you can't get anything done because you’ve got people coming up to you asking ‘Hey, what are you painting?’" McGauley said. "When you’re traveling and moving pretty fast, you don’t want to necessarily stop and get out your stuff and start painting right there."

The world traveler's artworks lie at the intersection between architecture and painting. For McGauley, each piece has a drawing underneath, but the use of color and artistic license to emphasize certain details make the painting of buildings different than a camera's image. 

"You can do away with telephone poles and unsightly blemishes that a building might have and present to the viewer something that maybe their imagination couldn’t collect in a photograph," he said.

Among McGauley's favorite details to emphasize are doorways, which he draws from the perspective of a pedestrian rather than an aerial view from farther away.

"It’s a building's way of greeting you and saying goodbye," he said.

McGauley is excited to share the space with three of his sisters and one of his brothers. Among them are a photographer, a wood sculptor, a painting restorer and an art teacher. While one of the siblings lives in nearby Richmond Heights and another lives in Brentwood, the other two are traveling from Denver and Atlanta.

"It’ll be a family reunion," McGauley said.