Reishi

Duncan Jago’s career as Mr. Jago began as a formative artist in Bristol’s acclaimed graffiti scene. He initiated the Scrawl movement, a school of street art that elected members based on their abilities with line, movement, and narrative composition. Jago was featured in the seminal, eponymous book Scrawl published in 1999.

Having studied illustration at the University of the West of England, Mr. Jago’s style, initially heavily illustrative, has evolved into something far more abstracted and expressive. Mr. Jago has taken spray painting to a level of sophistication rarely seen in the medium; there is maturity and depth to his use of colour which he uses to describe the natural world and the cosmos, as he says:

“A love of nature has been the biggest influence on my work, the forms and flows that exist within it seem to be appearing … more and more nowadays.”

These references to landscape imagery with less emphasis on gesture and brushstrokes, combined with a strong focus on colour and its emotional function, is strongly reminiscent of the mid-century Colour Field movement, pioneered by the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. Mr Jago is also influenced by painters such as Jules Olitski, Dan Chistensen and Albert Stadler.