Grant Applications
Narrative Grant
Doug Argue :: Narrative

Running downhill in diapers towards a swing in pure joy is my first memory. I also remember having ideas for drawings in the third grade, drawing grass with three colors to give it light, from yellow to green to blue. With my crayons I drew a Minnesotan field and added floating parachuted milkweed seeds to fly through it all. With this drawing I won my first prize from the Schweigert Meat Company and ten dollars cash. My teacher took a dim view of it, and talked glowingly about a realistic drawing of a sleeping dog.

And so it all began. It confused me then, and it does to this day, that anything can be considered more real than anything else. I knew I had a real idea that had excited me and propelled the drawing forward, and it made me wary of mimesis, of talent, even if I could not have expressed it like this, but talent seemed to need a preconceived outcome. I have seen a lot of great work that has employed copying nature as one of its tools, but that has never interested me as an artist. In 1980, the year I graduated from high school, the Walker Art Center presented a large Picasso exhibition and I was ready for what felt an explosion of creativity. This show inspired me to want to see more art in person, so I hitchhiked to New York by way of Chicago and stretched six hundred dollars through three weeks and a dozen museums. I slept secretly in back yards and in city parks in a sleeping bag. One night, in the rain, in Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago was very memorable. But for me what was most remarkable and profound was Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The space of his paintings reaching just beyond my peripheral vision into infinities, and the solid physical presence resonated very deeply in me.

I continued making drawings and paintings through high school, winning a painting competition from the 3M company for two thousand dollars to use if I enrolled in college. I used the money to stock up on books and art supplies, such as printmaking paper, as I headed off to Bemidji State University. In school I tried my hand at ceramics, photography, poetry, theatre, sculpture, painting, and drawing but I think my best work was done secretly at night by spraying dyes. During the critique the next day I surprised everyone by having them look out the second floor window down onto a painting of a snowman in the snow.

After two years I transferred to the University of Minnesota. My brother had died in a car accident fairly near my school; that and being ready for a bigger city propelled me to make the move. I don’t think we were ready for each other, the U of M and me. I was making paintings on sheets of aluminum that were bent and twisted and free standing with shiny enamel paint. The painting teachers complained that reflections off of my work were getting in the eyes of their serious students. They said it was sculpture and sent me down to the sculpture room. The sculpture professors complained I took up too much room and that I did not have any sculpture credits and so should not be taking up any space. I quickly got booted out of there and ended up working in the sand pit in the schools unused iron pour area. It gave a little texture to the work but it was not ideal. My shoes would get full of sand like I had spent the day at the beach.

Based on this experience, and poverty, I chose to use my limited resources to rent a studio and get to work. I never went back to school. I got a job as an orderly in a hospital, mostly carting about the dead and living. It paid well and I got to spend a lot of time in the studio.

The next year in 1984, with all of the new paintings from the past year, I won a grant from the Jerome Foundation. One of the jurors was Elizabeth Armstrong, who was working at the Walker Art Center at the time. She offered me a show at the Walker. I did a lot of wonderful paintings for the show and was very happy with it. In addition it was great exposure and a few people bought paintings and local galleries offered me shows. With this momentum I ended up doing about one solo show a year for the next ten years in various Twin City galleries. Naturally I quit the job to spend all of my time and effort on new work in the studio. The show from the Jerome Foundation traveled to the New Museum in New York.

Around this time I was fortunate enough to receive a local Minnesota grant from the McKnight Foundation in 1986, and regionally from the tri-state area from the Bush Foundation in 1988. Nationally I won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987. My program as stated for these grants was simply to keep painting.

I received a grant from the Jerome Foundation in 1990 to look at American Art. I rented a car for three months and criss-crossed the US mainland, passing through almost every state. I stopped at hundreds of museums and galleries along the way.

During this time traveling would become a pattern, I would work like crazy for a few years, and then travel the world to see new things for four or five months at a time. On one such trip I encountered Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion” in the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice. This painting hit me like Pollock did some twelve years earlier. It felt, I mean the form and the movement and the infinity of it, like it existed just beyond my vision and comprehension. And it was clear that the size was absolutely necessary in order to get this experience from the paintings.

So I took a crack at my own ideas at this scale, and envisioned four paintings that individually used one primary method of creating pictorial space. This idea, formulated in a moment took some seven years working almost every day to complete. Galleries balked at the scale and time frame I needed to do these works, and it would have been impossible financially for me to make these paintings without the grants I received along the way.

The four paintings are all almost the same size, around 12 x 20 feet. The first I thought of as infinite death. Using a high horizon line to make the space, I made an endless field of dead buffalo (Collection of Minnesota Historical Society).

It was finished in 1992 after a year of work, and was made possible by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board in 1991.The second I conceived of by thinking about where our food will come from as our human population approaches infinity. An Einstein-like mind experiment, but instead of riding a light beam, I considered food, and our modern food production. This is the context in which I came up with painting an infinite number of chickens using single point perspective (Private Collection, on loan to Weisman Art Museum from1994 to present). This painting was finished in 1994 after two years of work and made possible by a grant from the McKnight Foundation in 1992. It is one of the museums enduring, always-on-view favorites.

In the third I considered what it is to be in a world with almost infinite knowledge, where it is impossible to know even a small percentage of what is known. I used books and created the space by making overlapping color planes in somewhat of a cubist manner (Minneapolis Institute of Arts). Finished in 1997 this painting was made possible by a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1995.

And lastly I conceived of a more ephemeral space, a space in and between leaves as they blow in a breeze, so I made a large painting of very small leaves and created the space through atmospheric shifts. I made it in black and white, to get the feeling of it not being complete, as an elegy to my brother (Minnesota Museum of American Art). This painting was made in Rome and finished in 1998 as a part of my yearlong fellowship after winning the Rome prize in 1997. Each leaf is different, not to repeat itself, like generation after generation on this earth. We all have slight or large variations from all that precedes us: nothing is ever settled or totally stable. This attempt at infinite variation in a limited space is true for the books, chickens and buffalo as well. Not one buffalo, chicken, book, nor leaf ever exactly repeats the other.

It was in Rome that I met most of my best friends, serious scholars, writers, architects and my great and lovely wife, who is a landscape architect. It made me start thinking more about history and language in a general way.

One of the things I love about the Mexican muralists is that the work is so public; it is not easy for private collections to handle them. I am very, very proud that all four of these large works of mine have ended up in public collections and are a part of the community.

I produced three solo shows as a break from the all-consuming project I just described. The first of these shows was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts 1994. I did a show of some twenty paintings that were around 3 x 4 ft in size and featured my son and my memories of being a child as the main themes, in a world were proportion was distorted and adults appeared as huge and they only partially broke into picture plane, mainly as a hand or a foot. The influence here was the great-carved mountain of Ramses II in southern Egypt at the Temple of Abu Simbel near lake Nasser that I visited in 1998. His wives and children are hardly as big as his toes. This show was made possible by Grants from the Minnesota State arts board in 1994.

In 1996 and 1998 in New York City working with Emilio Steinberger, who is now Director of Haunch of Venison gallery in New York, I did two more solo shows. I loved the show we did that was of Durer-like empirical drawing studies, but it was studies of imaginary plants and animals, inspired by a strange and curious drawing Durer did of a rhinoceros, a animal he obviously never actually observed in person.

In 2000 I moved to San Francisco and worked initially on a series of portraits. I copied one of the chickens from the infinite chicken painting mentioned above, and decided to deal with it as an individual, separate from its initial environment. The idea was to create a painting whose over-all personality I found interesting; the personality was the whole painting and not just embedded within the figure of the chicken. Secondly I wanted to paint the same chicken over and over again to see how it evolved by changing its surroundings. These paintings were made possible, in part, by a grant from the Golden Family Foundation in 2001. I decided to add text to the portraits because it felt like a good next step for their evolution into a more modern world, more like a space I saw on my computer or a billboard and even on television.

Looking around the studio, at the end of a long workday, I noticed many of the discarded individual letter stencils lying randomly about the floor, and from afar they created an image of a universe. I decided on the spot to make a painting using letters, without the chicken, and done in a similar design to what I had seen on the floor.

At this time, around three years ago, I retreated to my studio, and stopped showing in order to put together this new body of work. I am just now finishing these paintings and they are illustrated in my text and slide presentation for this application. In 2009 an international jury of eighteen members from eleven different countries selected me as the London International Creative Competitions Artist of the year, from 5,000 artists worldwide based on these new paintings.
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Grant Applications
Narrative Grant
Doug Argue :: Grant

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 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.

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 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 Placed 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.

The paintings I described are all near completion, but they may take a year or more to finish. I will also start new work during the fellowship period, in which I will continue to think about chaos and evolution and our human fascination with making some sense of it. I will also keep in mind Baudelaire’s call to question conventions and make art true to ones own time. Yet, like Baudelaire’s poetry, with its extraordinary elegance, there is a timeless ahistorical quality that is very important to me.
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