Joe MacGown

I am a self-taught artist originally from Maine, but now living in Starkville, Mississippi with my wife Julie and my son Joseph. I have worked the last twenty years at the Mississippi Entomological Museum at Mississippi State University as a research technician/scientific illustrator. Throughout my life, art has been a constant. I began drawing and painting at a very young age. By the time I was in kindergarten, I had already begun a style or genre of art that was to become a life long pursuit. The type of art that I prefer to do could probably be best described as surreal or visionary art. As early as four years old, I remember trying to do my best to twist reality with my drawings and paintings. However, that is not to say that I haven’t done more typical artwork, and I have done watercolor seascapes, floral studies, portraits, old buildings, impressionistic landscapes, and a multitude of other types of art.
Throughout the last 25 years, I have continued to develop my surrealistic drawing style, which I refer to as “Neogothic Surrealism” or “Subconscious Meandering.” I predominately work in black ink, using fine-tipped Koh-i-noor Rapidograph pens, but also do mixed media color works. I do highly detailed drawings, building layers by crosshatching, stippling, and other methods. The end result is a style that is reminiscent of 15th century etchings. The structure of my artwork is predicated on the drawing of random shapes, after which I then draw shapes in the negative spaces created by the first shapes, and so forth. Subject matter is not a stumbling block because everywhere I look I see interesting things. For example, it is should be quite apparent that I work in entomology, as my art is often intermixed with various insectoid body parts. Similarly, it should be obvious that I have read a great deal of science fiction. All of my observations are thrown into my mind where they are intermixed with other memories, thoughts, and ideas. They are later expressed in random ways in my drawings. When I begin a drawing, I usually have no preconceived idea of what I am going to draw, other than at most a minimal idea or a basic shape. I do not do underlying pencil sketches, but instead start working directly with the pen. This allows for more spontaneity and subconscious flow, which is the basis for all of my surreal art. My themes tend to be many-fold, as I do many types of artwork, but recent work centers on the interrelationship of the environment and all forms of the animate and inanimate. As I have studied nature over the course of my life, I have come to realize that every little thing we do affects something else, whether it be negative or positive

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