Doug Maguire
My work is about solitude and freedom.
The landscape is a metaphor for breath, life and transformation. The paintings must breathe and change also. For me, freedom from material constraints is best expressed through the mutability of nature.
Bio
I was born, raised and educated in New York City. After attending the High School of Music and Art in which I majored in Architecture, I joined the U.S. Navy and was trained to be an Aerographer or Meteorologist’s aide.
I finished two years at Pratt on partial scholarship and dropped out to work, to raise the money: to continue my education. I went to work for a display company as a builder/artist. At the 1964 World’s Fair, I worked to build, finish and install scale models of the world’s mountain ranges. Before returning to Pratt I attended classes in philosophy and sculpture, at the New School for Social Research in NYC. I returned to Pratt in 1965. In1967 I graduated from Pratt with a BFA in Art Education and a NY Provisional Teaching Certification for grades K-12. Later on I received an MFA from The City College of New York.
In September of 1967 I began teaching art on the middle school level as a regular substitute. I taught full time in the NYC school system. Also, I began doing graduate coursework, evenings, in drawing and painting at Brooklyn College of CUNY, as a non matriculated graduate student.
For the 67/68 school years, I taught and studied and painted. In the summer of 1968 my wife Anna and I accepted an artist residency, each, for two months at the Edwin MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Anna and I had married in 1966. That summer we paid our first visit to Mexico.
We worked as secondary art teachers in rural school districts at home. I managed to do some college level teaching and lecturing at Columbia-Greene Community College, via an evening course for adults in painting. Further, I taught at Boston University as a guest lecturer, at Bennett College as the Director of the Summer Art Program, and at the Woodstock School of Art; a summer painting workshop.
My family and I have been to Greece often over the years and it has informed me, as has Ireland, Maine and Puerto Rico of the endless variations of land, ocean currents and skies, foliage, atmosphere that I paint.
Coming out of the city, I taught for 27 years in rural Greene county and still live in Woodstock, NY: two places on earth where romantic realism was nurtured and is in collision with ‘abstract-isms’ of every stripe. Having been highly visual and confronted by divergent choices I followed my instincts to the mountains and forests and abandoned my 3rd generation abstract tendencies only to rediscover them in the shadows of the forest night closing in.