ET Trigg
January 2022’s Featured Artist
Artist Bio:
ET is 83 years old. He only started sculpting and painting three years ago. He was originally trained as a mathematician and that inspires a lot of his art. He is also inspired by the humanist author Kurt Vonnegut and has made a number of paintings and sculptures referring to his works.
For thirty years from the age of 21 to 52 he was very lucky and lived in San Francisco, the most wonderful city in the world, at the most perfect time in human history, during the prime of his life. He surfed and did pottery and studied mathematics and played duplicate bridge and worked as a computer programmer doing physics on large scale computers–a job he loved. Devastated by the AIDS epidemic he finally left California and wandered the world a bit, and was captivated by the beauty of Greece and Spain.
In 2011 he settled down in Charlotte. Until the epidemic struck he spent most of his time in Charlotte as a hospice volunteer, playing tournament bridge (he became a life master at age 80) and—in recent years—making art.
Artist Statement:
I am a Platonist. I believe that art, like mathematics, is more discovered than created. Every painting, those dots and swirls and streaks and blobs of pigment, is just one of the almost countless random assortments of these particular colors. Sometimes I take walks in this vast enchanted landscape hoping I will stumble upon something interesting. Having discovered a potential piece of art I fight and claw and wrestle trying to drag it to ground and pull it out of the wilderness into the light of day. Sometimes I succeed. More often I find imposters and pretenders. These I throw back into the swirling chaos.
