Alec Egan studied Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Ohio receiving a BA with the departments highest honors. During his time at college painting became an escape from academia, one that inspired a freedom. In the painting process he found the same intellectual and conceptual challenges that he cherished in writing, however he also found a new and unparalleled desire for the physicality of the painting process. Alec believed that the physicality involved in this process more genuinely reflected the sentiment of his ideas than the process of writing. Upon graduating in 2007, Alec chose to focus primarily on making art. He works in Los Angeles, California, Maquoketa, Iowa and Burlington, Vermont.

Conceptually his art is born out of emotional response, however it is also informed by a very specific literary and philosophical analysis of the world we live in. Alec’s inspiration and influence can be directly linked to certain philosophical and literary thinkers. Thinkers who consider the existential quandary (time, mortality, and space) of the human being yet also confront the contradictory social and political conventions of the world in which he lives. Sartre, Nietzsche, Conrad, Dostoevsky, are a few of many thinkers, from whom he derives guidance and inspiration for his art.

Alec’s vision, direction, passion is to apply this informed philosophical and intellectual framework to help address the issues plaguing his generation. His paintings strive to be accessible, emotive, and provocative in order to make the viewer enter the scene of the painting but also to question the intention of the work. In both cases, the sentiment that lies in his paintings is a call for a shift. A shift from the quicksand and middle-ground in which we are stuck. Essentially, he hopes his paintings beg the question, “If what you see is ugly than maybe things should change?”. As an artist, Alec believes, there is one very important boundary to always be in contact with: to be subversive yet demanding.