Emmet Duggan

    In high school, Emmet was a physics geek who was really good at drawing the things in front of him.  He entered a contest at the age of fifteen at Huntington Fine Arts (Huntington, NY) and won a scholarship to study drawing, painting, and sculpture where he was trained academically in figure drawing, landscape painting, and still life.  Emmet earned scholarships to Boston University (BFA ’99) and University of Pennsylvania (MFA ’01).  Studying color theory in graduate school with Robert Slutzky, a student of Joseph Albers, Emmet began to develop color as a subject in and of itself. Alongside John Moore he studied interiors, light, and how environment can become narrative. He was enamored of the way color changes in proximity to other colors and performs tricks within the context of representational painting. He meditated on synthetic cubist paintings by Picasso, Op Art by Bridgette Riley, the “Cold Mountain” series by Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, and Robert Ryman as well as classical paintings by Vermeer , Ingres, Estes, And Antonio Lopez Garcia.  Emmet taught drawing, painting, and abstract theory at University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and worked for Pace Wildenstein as an archival photographer through 2005 where he met a hero Chuck Close. He lived in Brooklyn through 2006  then moved to Boston  and installed and packed artwork for museums in Boston, MA through 2009.  In 2013 Emmet moved to Rural Arkansas to focus on in his painting, teaching and family.  Emmet currently teaches at UA Cossatot and paints his imaginative bird hoses in a studio in his home.

Artist Statement

After living in Boston, Philadelphia and Brooklyn from 1995-2013, I had to leave everything I knew behind.  I moved to Morningstar, Arkansas, a town with a population of 120, two miles down a dirt road and quarter mile from my closest neighbor.  Broken and lost, I spent my mornings drinking coffee in the woods and, to my delight, found teams of birds commuting all around me.  As time rolled on and the winter started to set in, my bird friends moved away, and my life became stark. 

I moved to a La-Z-Boy in a tiny run-down, one bedroom house, longing for an escape, and reclined.  In my mind, I remodeled, bought furniture, collected art and of course, invited my friends to my dream home. 

My posh vignettes danced from my mind into my studio, and what started as an escape became a fully realized painting project .  I spent my mornings finding birds on my iPad, building rooms from scratch, looking at fabrics and wallpaper and imagining what kind of painting my bird friends would enjoy.  I spent a year down that dirt road, living in my imagination, building these paintings and forged a new path.  I moved back to town, fell in love and got an Adjunct Professor position.  I renovated a bigger house and now have my coffee with Brandy Lynn. 

Often, it is my imagination that inspires me to take new paths in life.  When life becomes bleak, my imagination rescues me from the void and plants a seed for new life to grow.  These paintings are what I imagined at a time in my life when I needed to be rescued, and now that I thrive again I paint rooms I actually live in as well as rooms I dream of building along with my companions I meet along the way.  With love- Emmet