FRED DUIGNAN

"Throughout (Duignan) is on a spiritual quest, cracking open his Catholic heritage into painterly fragments and invented images"

Paterson & the Mills

INDUSTRY & CREATIVITY

Fred Duignan Artist

Paterson was a cauldron for Fred Duignan’s art and life. He was brought up in nearby industrial Carlstadt and suburban Rutherford. After a few years in California, he became a resident in the Paterson artist housing for two significant decades of his creative life (1984-2003). While doing odd jobs to support his art, he become a generator of the local art scene as Executive Director of the Essex-Phoenix Artists Association (’87-88), art writer [Cover Magazine (NYC, ’88-90) and the NJ Herald (‘97)] and Curator of Contemporary Art of the Paterson Museum (1992-97). All of this rooted him in Paterson’s original arts creation within the radically changing industrial place of his time. Three modalities in Duignan’s paintings tell us much about this place. First were abstracted black silhouetted images of the beauty and decay of the old silk, locomotive, aircraft engine, and firearms mills of the period, with tilted walls, empty windows, and angled energies against haunting skies and the crashing force of the Falls. Second were 10 portraits of his fellow artists and poets of the mills-- expressive, wrought, dark and light, giving off presence and fraught commitment. Most individuals were from Paterson and environs. These artists and writers went out into the community and beyond as photographers, teachers, mural painters, and local characters. A creative scene had developed and had its long-lasting effect. Third is the example of Duignan’s own art imbued with the cross-currents of this place over the whole of his career--struggles of inner and outer darkness, vivid color, overlays of living paint, found symbols, and fragmented figuration that thematically speak of chaos and transcendence of that chaos.

-- Sara Lynn Henry, exhibition curator