Artist of the Month

January 2010

Doug Argue

San Francisco, CA

I was born in 1962 in Saint Paul Minnesota. I attended Bemidji State University from 1980 to 1982 and the University of Minnesota for one year in 1983. My son Mattison was born in 1989 and I met my wife in Rome in 1998.

I showed often in galleries and at the Walker Art Center from 1983 to 1993 when I started a group of large-scale paintings that took up almost ten years of my life. All four ended up in museum collections. The last of the group was done in Rome, where I spent a year as the recipient of the Rome prize.

I moved to San Francisco after I got married in 2000 and I continued to show often until about three years ago, when I locked myself into the studio to complete a new body of work; which is represented here.

TAL: How and when did you start creating art?

DA : I have very distinct memories of ideas I had for making drawings with wax crayons even as a young child.

TAL: What media and genres do you work in?

DA :

I work on almost any ground with all different painting media, and some non-painting media.

TAL: Who or what are your influences?

DA : Science, math, philosophy and all of the art I have ever seen. I love big paintings, like Pollock and Tintoretto, and see no reason to give up this scale to movie theatres, billboards, installations and sculpture.

TAL: What was your inspiration for ""?

DA :

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 fact that each generation can take building blocks, like language, and remake the world to answer their questions, and fulfill their needs, is the genesis of this work.

TAL: Describe your creative process.

DA : It is always different but it is common for me to have an idea, and to try and create a work based on that idea. I look at the painting and feel a gut wrenching pain filled with panic, and destroy that idea because it seems too easy or too stupid to be of any value. After an odyssey of battling and battering notions, I fight and beg and pray to emerge on the other side with something I find interesting and that is mine.

TAL: What are you working on currently?

DA :

An infinite number of Pie charts, where the colors of the pie charts only measure the amount of color in each wedge of that pie chart.

TAL: What are your near/long term goals as an artist?

DA :

Love of life.

TAL: Where can people view/purchase your work?

DA :

www.dougargue.com , Minneapolis Institute of Art, Weisman art Museum.