Gary Bagnall

 

Member profile details

Membership level
Artist (Senior)
First Name
Gary
Last name
Bagnall
 

Personal information

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Artist Info

Medium / Media
  • Painting / Drawing
Artist Bio or Résumé
Born 1959 in Larne, Northern Ireland, with family throughout the Island of Ireland, Dr Bagnall comes from a creative family. Music and painting have been a presence throughout his personal and professional life. Playing violin, guitar, singing in professional opera choruses and for ever painting. As a professional in law and corporate finance, he founded and managed a small local amateur opera company, ‘Vox Opera’. As tenured legal scholar at Queens University, Belfast, where he earned his Ph.D in legal theory, he published ground breaking theoretical treatises that took contemporary ideas from art theory, combined cutting edge philosophy of science to completely restructure our concepts of law and liberty. Work he continues to develop and publish. Largely self taught as a painter, acrylic, soft pastel and pen have dominated his work, which has sold internationally and been recognised in many juried Exhibitions. His present focus is with representational and conceptual works, created using heavy bodied acrylic medium, brush and knife on canvas. Dr Bagnall lives in Newton MA with his wife Laurie Halloran, a leading life sciences founder and consultant, with whom he enjoys an eclectic art collection. His energy is divided between painting, academic writing, building scientific networks and joint ventures between the island of Ireland and the U.S., as well as supporting a portfolio of local and African serving 501c(3) non-profits.
Artist Statement
What is ‘art’? A lifetime of reflection has brought me to this radical answer:

“Art is the social activity of engaging…creative structures and processes and evaluating them for artistic quality… All art is public art.”

Art is something we do. The sharing of personal judgments derived from common engagement of creative works. Artfulness is not integral to the works structure, rather, it is a social judgment about it, made possible by our shared concepts of art. That a work is art, is sustained through the ongoing public engagement of the work. No engagement, no art work. Just the work, with the potential to become art through engagement. All art is ‘public’ art, in that it is society that actively creates the art work through these multiple individual engagements. What today passes for public art is better called ‘civic’ or ‘urban’ art, work that is engaged in public spaces rather than private. This usage avoids the semantic ambiguity of ‘public’, as both a community of individuals (the artistic sense) and an open environment where individuals can freely congregate (the contextual sense). Furthermore, a creative work is not art because it conforms to absolute, universal forms or standards. There are no boundaries delimiting what structures humans may determine to be art. Artistic metrics are patterns derived from actual works of art, patterns such as ‘form’, ‘style’ or ‘tradition’. Also, there is perpetual reciprocity. The patterns assist evaluation of the artistic merit of a putative art work, but as they are concepts extracted from the works themselves, they are subject to ongoing revision to reflect the changing reality of those works we collectively identify as artistic. For example, digital paintings (such as Hockney’s iPad pictures) are now deemed to have the capacity for artistic quality, so our common concept of ‘painting’ has undergone adjustment to include digital mediums and the concept of ‘art’ itself revised to include determinations of artistic quality with respect to digital artefacts and algorithmic processes. Installation art works forced conceptual revision to include spatial context and improvised activity as art and Duchamp’s ‘Urinal’ extended judgements of artistic quality to previously excluded utilitarian artefacts. It is within this dynamic, evolving concept of art as a perpetual social activity that we create our unique structures, for others to engage and collectively evaluate for artistic merit.
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