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DUGGIE FIELDS A R T

When Duggie Fields was an art student in the late 1960's, he painted abstract pictures - hard edged, geometrical, flat cloured. Just as he was completing one canvas, he decided, on the spur of the moment, to add a small image of Donald Duck. It transformed an abstract composition into a figurative one: the non-referential geometric shapes re-assembled themselves into the simple, child-like, painting of a house. The canvas infuriated his teachers, but it proved to be more than a light-hearted gesture. "My work had been conceptual in effect, illustrating mathematical equations. I had been thinking of how to produce; I had not responded to, or looked at, what I was producing. I thought I was doing one thing, but found I was doing another." Fields accepted this discovery and allowed himself to become the figurative artist who had been struggling to break through an abstract manner. However, that was not the end of the story. His best work still retains a balance between abstraction and figuration. This balance, or dualism, is echoed (in his conversation) by other pairs of ideas, art and life: body and soul: flesh and cosmetics/costume . "Every motive contains it's opposite; positive implies negative; up implies down."                                                                                                                       IKON GALLERY 1980

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