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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Statement for Doug Argue
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When I head into the studio each morning to paint, I am never certain what I am going to do, and I am grateful it rarely goes as I expect. The days and years have been full of surprises.
The meanings I find in life evolve from my actions, from me living my life. I am not trying to adapt myself to a set of rules or a particular philosophy and I approach my paintings in the same way. Each is a survivor of its own odyssey, which gives it a unique history. The scale gives me the space I need to create a record of the changes I make through time, and it helps generate the feeling that the painting extends beyond the image, outside of my peripheral vision and imagination. Each work has its layers of archaeological depths both in its imagery and physically through accreting layers of paint. As part of my process it is common to add and subtract by painting over previous layers of paint. Some information gets covered and lost, while some remains, arriving at a somewhat mysterious present state. I do believe in originality in art, and art as true knowledge. I do not believe in it empirically, as a science, requiring evidence, as a proof. For me it is a balance between knowledge and intuition the gap between reality and what we can see of reality.
Through this non-scientific knowledge what I want to convey is some understanding, perhaps intuitive as well, of what it is like for me to be alive. In my selection of images I have tried to show the stream of my work over the last few years. Though I am not an artist who thinks the creative process by itself is necessarily interesting, I do want you to be able to see the mental leaps and jumps I have made. Certainly they are unique to me living here and now in this crazy world of ours.
I noticed how letters, like atoms and chromosomes, are basic building blocks that can be taken apart and reconstructed in new ways, and that through time the forms they create change, like Heraclitus's river that cannot be stepped in twice; everything is in a constant evolutionary flow. For example, in a course from The Teaching Company called, "The History of the English Language" by Professor Seth Lerer, he talks about how now silent letters used to be pronounced and now represent something akin to archaeological remains, like fossils, giving evidence of the history of the language and how it has changed. Or a recent article I read in Nature magazine said that, after genetic analysis of some Tyrannosaurus Rex genetic material, its closest living relative is a chicken. Evolution in this context, in nature or culture, has no ultimate aim or final destination; but we live under these constantly shifting sands, whether we recognize the origins of our cultures and behaviors or not.
I used letters in the simplest random way I could to make "Isotropic"; essentially I created my own universe out of letters. In the spirit of remaking an old form into a new one and to create a less predictable pattern of letters in the painting than an alphabetical one, in "The New Organon" I took letters from the book of Genesis and after distorting them digitally I put them back together into a big bang. The shifting cosmologies of time past and time present are ever mixing a new cocktail of myths and realities.
The Foramen Magnum is the hole at the base of the skull through which the nerves run that carry messages between the brain and body. In my work of that name, I cut out letters from my old artist statements and randomly reassembled the letters into ephemeral columns.
In "Tuffatore" "Diver", I added a solo diver from an Etruscan tomb painting to an endless array of pie charts, inspired by both our recent election, where we were all parceled into such anti-individualistic, generic voting demographics, and by a small section of a poem by Stephen Spender which says, "of course the entire effort is to put oneself outside of the ordinary range of what are called statistics…"
In "Developing Story" and in the spirit of a Don Quixote look at postmodernism, I have drawn randomly from images in different times and places, including newspapers, computers and television, a nightmarish image where skaters could fall unnoticed through the ice, or wax-winged humans fall unseen from the sky.
In "Randomly Applied Exact Percentages" I am inspired by the amazing diagrams in scientific magazines that apply wonderful exact knowledge to what appears to be amorphous, vibrantly colored gases in an imagined pictorial space. The language around the diagrams tends to be impenetrable to anyone not in the same field of study. It is not necessary, in science, for the model or diagram that is used to portray an idea, to actually accurately represent reality. We need only to think of mathematics to understand this: what counts is only that these models make correct reproducible predictions of reality. In fact these models in diagram form tend to create images I have never seen anywhere else, and are fantastically, and wildly abstract. These models and diagrams exist in that space I am interested in, perhaps like Rauschenberg's space that he called the gap between art and life, and I think of it as a gap between the mind, the senses, and what we can know of reality.
It is impossible to tell exactly how long a painting will take as I allow them to develop at their own pace. The paintings I described are all near completion, but it is likely that it will take at least a year or more to finish the whole group. In the new work I will continue to think about “chaos” and evolution and our fascination with making some sense of it. Like infinity, it will likely remain just beyond my comprehension, and that is how I like it.
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