About THE ARTIST

Alexander McQueen Duncan was born in 1973 and grew up in rural Oxfordshire. The son of a painter and a sculptor presented Duncan with little alternative other than pursuing art and design as a profession. After his degree course at Central Saint Martins School of Art, his work focused entirely on landscape, figure painting and portraiture.

He became a tutor in painting and drawing at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in Chelsea where he currently teaches. In 2007, Duncan was awarded the Royal Society of British Artist’s Rome Scholarship and a period of direct study from observation of Rome’s ancient Forum and the surrounding rural landscape.

An extensive period of travel across Italy followed with a major solo show in Milan opened by the Assessor of Culture in Milan. The exhibition entitled ‘Transience and Permanence’ explored the fusion between objective time based recordings and impressions recalling the experience as a whole.

A love of travel has taken him to regions where the diversity and extremes of geography and atmosphere has enabled him to explore and paint a range of distinctive qualities of place, these include: Florence, Rome, Venice, Calabria, Aspen, Patagonia, Provence, Jerusalem and Iceland.

Duncan’s work engages with abstract and expressionist elements drawn from both direct observation and memorised sensations; a visual dialogue between representational and contemplative observation. Transparency is one of the keys to his paintings forming a subtext or underpainting alluding to images which are sensed before they are seen.

In many cases the main subject is revealed through a number of drawn or printed images over which transparent drifts of colour and over drawn tracery interact with the original marks. His current work has moved towards an experimental approach using wood, metal, mixed media and printmaking. Glimpses and fleeting moments are fused with embedded images, a convergence not only of different ways of seeing and interpretation but in visually activating the picture plane both pictorially and as a spontaneous descriptive and expressive surface.

Contact

You can get in touch with Alexander via the email address below with any comments or enquiries about his work: acmduncan@gmail.com