Doug Agnew

The paintings are to bring into being images that were fleeting yet significant as visions or feelings looking for visual form Braque said “With age, Art and Life become One.”  -  I hope he’s right about that.

We have two brains with two editing suites for incoming visuals,  one deals with “Documentaries” the other with “Features” or to put it another way Information and Inspiration.  For the preservation of the species it is as well to know which is which but there are those precious moments between sleeping and waking when you’re not sure whether you’re dreaming or thinking when you get that ”mind-at-large” awareness, this is where Art is conceived before you know it your left brain has started a “to do” list and it’s all over but maybe something has been planted.  From the above I probably don’t need to say I was at Art school in the sixties, whence I landed as from an alien planet. 

Having been incarcerated in boarding schools from the age of nine I had of course, no art education and no experience of the female “Blessed was it in that dawn to be alive” and all that but a steep learning curve it was.  I exhibited in Manchester at the Whitworth and City galleries and nationally with the Arts Council.  Then I taught for thirty years acquired five children, built houses to put them in, started many projects, built Studios to put them in None of which would have happened without my beloved Chris, muse, P.A., Comedienne, wife and creative power-house, We miss her.

Now I’m seventy……No, I don’t believe it either! you will see from much of my work that I have a thing for mixed-media. It has been described as my Lasagna period.  I am now animating this process to make film using shadow-puppets stop-frame and other alchemies.  Fortunately I have a son who is a film-maker and two more who are musicians.  Parents! They do get to be useful eventually. 

Among the helpings of Lasagna, which should be seen as music rather than food, there are paintings about specific, well remembered dreams (Flow & Return) or hauntings (Europa 1). The mixed-media pieces are improvisational. They go through a sort of free-form jig-saw phase out of which they take on a life of their own with ever more specific imperatives. The work is finished when nothing more can be added, however tempting. The titles are not usually perverse, they either spark a memory as in “Picnic near Fez” or have a particular atmosphere to be amplified verbally.