a South African artist makes his mark in New York

FEATURED ARTIST: LUKE BAGGOTT

After receiving an MA in Digital Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand, and despite early recognition in South Africa, Luke Baggott was drawn to the world’s most dynamic art scene in New York City. In 2017 the prestigious New York Academy of Art, founded by Andy Warhol, accepted Luke on a scholarship into their Master of Fine Arts program. “I was awarded the Academy Scholar Award, which I was able to maintain through my second year. I was privileged to receive the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant which contributed significantly towards my tuition, as well as the David Schafer collector award. I was given a grant from the Thea Petschek Lervolino Foundation towards my accommodation at International House, and I have been made a Resident Fellow for the current academic year. My New York artistic development has been further enriched by training from some of my painting heroes, including Vincent Desiderio, Alex Kanevsky and Margaret Bowland, to name a few. The celebrated painter, Bo Bartlett, is currently mentoring me.”

Luke currently works from a studio in Harlem, New York City. He shares this space with many other artists all producing very different work. “I would say that my style can be broadly described as NeoSurrealist. It is essentially a combination of the diverse styles of the artists that have been of pivotal influence on me, combined with my own struggles, discoveries and experimentation through self-training. I am not interested or attracted to photo-realism; rather, I look for ways to disrupt through abstraction and the use of antithetical imagery and imagination. I believe it is important to create art in response to personal experiences. Perhaps this is why my current landscape work features so much cityscape. I try to convey in the way I paint the struggles between connection and disconnect in a city that is so familiar but also so very foreign.”