Recent Sculpture:

Happiness is Boring

Doug McAbee

2005

This body of work utilizes bold color and familiar imagery as powerful tools for communication.  Initially attracted by the brightness of the colors in this work, viewers are left to consider the logical or illogical relationship between the colors and the images.  Personal associations with the colors and images may then be considered allowing the works to take on new and perhaps unintended meanings.  These associations may develop as images and colors are processed and attached to personal experiences.  Possible interpretations will assuredly differ from person to person, but regardless of the individual meanings derived, a conversation has been initiated between the viewer and the sculptures that leads to the transfer of ideas.

Each experience with these sculptural forms is a process.  As viewers instinctively try to decipher what the forms are, changes take place within the works that make a specific interpretation illusive.  Each work represents a fusion of two or more images and forms that seem to change from one into another during visual inspection.  These new forms are at once familiar and yet unrecognizable.  Often these images and forms have been chosen because of their opposition to one another.  This juxtaposition of disparate elements creates an interesting duality in the works that generates a multi-layered conversation. 

Recent Drawings:

One Percent Evil

Doug McAbee

2007

This new body of work represents a return to drawing, my first artistic interest.  After working primarily in sculpture for several years I wanted to find a way to take my visual vocabulary and use it to rethink my approach to drawing.  Leaving behind large scale, realistic, heavily shaded graphite drawings, I relied on the fresh and honest use of doodles and sketches collected on a daily basis.

 Those sketches revolved around everyday life and the objects and images associated with my personal experiences.  Descending from those sketches, these drawings become the narrators for actual events and often the translators of my own inner dialogues.  The images here are used with less emphasis on how that particular image appears in reality and with more emphasis on how the image appears in my memory.  The colors also dwell more in the symbolic and allegorical than in the realistic. 

Each color and each image, while holding significant personal meaning to me, will almost always take on new meanings and interpretations to the viewer.  These new interpretations are equally as valid and true as are my own.