Archer Dougherty

STATEMENT

When Archer was small – smaller than she is now – she spent her time reading the Oz books, drawing, finding cicada wings her mother insisted belonged to fairies, and wending her roundabout way through private school.

Aghast at suddenly finding herself grown up, and that the wings hidden in her Oz books actually do belong to 

cicadas, Archer’s work deals with the uneasy transition from living in that imaginary world from her

childhood, and the harsh reality of adulthood. The femmes in her paintings and drawings are in a Neverland stage of growing up, the point at which the illusions fall away but adulthood is still some time off.

Dark and dreamlike; intense with an ethereal beauty, her work attempts to visually portray that inner struggle which finds its way into everyone’s consciousness. The point at which you ask yourself, “When did I change into this person? And who am I supposed to become?”

Archer, a graduate of the UNM college of Fine Arts, lives in Albuquerque with her husband and two children – some may call them dogs. She still reads the Oz books from time to time, and now tells her nephew the wings in her collection belong to real fairies.  She currently exhibits around the world, and her work is held in many private collections.

Archer grew up in Albuquerque, and studied every single medium but painting at the University of New Mexico. She took as much drawing as she could but her figurative tendencies were not popular with the generational abstract professors, and consequently she was never encouraged in her development as a draftsperson. Drawing was a means to an end, not a finished product of itself. She finished school with degrees in three-dimensional media.

Having been out of school for a few years, Archer came to realize that art is what you make of it, not what other people tell you it is. Two years ago she began drawing again, having become bored with her three dimensional work. Through drawing, Archer rediscovered her passion. Her figures began materializing once again in sketchbooks and paper, then finally onto wood panels. She then began experimenting with painting on top of her drawings and learned, because irony has a great sense of humor, that she was being drawn into the one media she never professionally studied.

Archer is currently hard at work developing her long overdue figurative training and painting techniques, while drawing and painting for shows across the globe.