If
you met Edward Dugmore today, it would be difficult not to notice
that his hands are always busy. He never seems to stop sketching
or
playing with materials at hand – in addition to his many hours
of painting. So in the late 1940's, when this man, overflowing with
artistic passion, encountered San Francisco's answer to the New York
School, one could only expect an explosion. Like his good friends
Clyford Still and Ernest Briggs at the California School of Fine Arts,
the headquarters of West Coast abstraction, Dugmore pushed the brinks
of painterly expression to explore what D. H. Lawrence called “the
direct utterance from the instant whole man.” The idea was
to produce an art that was emotional, spontaneous, and uninhibited
by
intellecture considerations.
.
. . Dugmore's drawing has provided an outlet for his restless imagination,
but they have never been a means to a separate end on canvas; rather
the should be regarded as self-sufficient statements with an expressive
life of their own.
— Susan
Landauer, 1994 Oakland, CA
