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February Issue 2004
Gallery 556 Opens on Upper King Street in Charleston, SC
A new gallery has opened on upper King Street in Charleston, SC. Gallery 556 is offering paintings by Will McDougal, along with ceramic works by Jessica Foos Jones and cold glass sculpture by Taylor Lominick. "Offering fine art with a difference" the gallery will bring contemporary artwork to the ever growing and changing face of Charleston. The gallery is a wonderful space filled with light and framed by brick; visit often for the changing exhibits and extra events, to be announced.
The gallery is first featuring works by Will McDougal, who formerly showed with the Tippy Stern Gallery. Ranging from the simplicity of an everyday interior view, through variations on the human face, to bold abstractions of color fields held at bay and highlighted by black outlines, McDougal's work is full of movement and energy expressing the artist's journey to and through the work. He says that much of what he is doing is "formal, as making sentences out of vocabulary is formal. I use a lexicon of shapes and some of my own grammatical rules to construct sentences or phrases out of form and color. The landscape drawings are phrases of music constructed from line. All of the works are self portraits, even the abstract ones. They are reflections of my mental, emotional and physical states at the time I made them."
McDougal from a young age studied art books, illustrations of all kinds and loved Asterix and Tin Tin and as he says, "Of course, comic books of the 20s through the 80s." His training ranges from figure drawing to 3-D animation to graphic design. He dabbled in art through his early teens then drew a great deal in the following years. College was a time of intense artistic development for McDougal. He began experimenting and keeping sketchbooks of his work. Following college, designing art for apparel, labels and handtags as a graphic artist impacted his understanding of influencing another person with visual imagery. The artist says "Painting is a primordial experience for both the viewer and the practitioner. The early artists were painting in earnest and so do I," says McDougal. Guides from the past for McDougal were Thomas Hart Benton, Goya, Picasso, El Greco and Herriman. Receiving early and consistent support from his family including his nursery school painting being framed and hung, McDougal has thrived on his artistic exploration and is dedicating his fulltime energy to it.
McDougal graduated from Charleston Day School, Christ School in Arden, NC, and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Since then he has studied at Parsons School of Design, Pratt, School of Visual Arts and the Art Students' League. The training ranged from figure drawing to 3-D animation to graphic design. He now splits his time between Western Massachusetts and Charleston.
For more info check our SC Commercial Gallery listings or call 843/577-3669.
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