Mr Jago

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 the idioms of 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.”

The intensity of the colours, textures and forms within Jago’s work reflect the interconnectedness of people with the latitude of nature. His dismissal of traditional art conventions and practices allow the flow of paint to determine the final result that we see. Furthermore, Jago’s abstract and unique style emphasise his interests and concerns for warfare, biosphere and climate change. It is through Jago’s abstracted and expressive style that demonstrate the accessibility and openness of his works.