Joe MacGown
About the ArtistI am originally from Maine where I lived until I was about ten years old. My family then moved to Starkville, Mississippi, where I still live with my wife Julie and our son Joseph. I have been employed for the last twenty years at the Mississippi Entomological Museum at Mississippi State University as a research technician/scientific illustrator. I am a self-taught artist and I began drawing and painting at a very young age. By the time I was five years old, I had already begun a style of art that was to become a life long pursuit – surreal art. Even with my first drawings and paintings I remember trying to do my best to twist reality. Throughout the last 25 years, I have continued to develop my surrealistic drawing style, which I refer to as “Neogothic Surrealism” or “Subconscious Meandering.” I usually work with black India ink, using fine-tipped Koh-i-noor Rapidograph pens, but also do mixed media color works. I do highly detailed drawings, building layers by crosshatching, stippling, and other methods. Some of these drawings take up to 300 hours to finish. I draw whenever I have free time, which usually means nights and weekends. The structure of my artwork is based on the drawing of random shapes, after which I then draw shapes in the negative spaces created by the first shapes, and so forth. Although I find subject matter everywhere, much of my inspiration comes from my love of science fiction and from my studies of nature. For example, it should be obvious that I work in entomology, as my art is often intermixed with various insectoid body parts. All of my observations are thrown into my mind where they are intermixed with memories and other thoughts. They are later expressed in random ways in my drawings. When I begin a drawing, I usually have no preconceived idea of what I am going to draw, other than at most a minimal idea or a basic shape. I do not do underlying pencil sketches, but instead start working directly with the pen. This allows for more spontaneity and subconscious flow, which is the basis for all of my surreal art. Does my art mean anything? Possibly, however because I typically put minimal to no thought into what I am doing, any meaning has more to do with who I am as an individual and where I am in life at any given time. Member DataMembership: exclusive member since Jun. 2, 2008 |
