Chad Heggen

Chad Heggen was born into a world of art. Growing up going to art shows and galleries. His art education started early being a son of an active artist and art teacher in Davenport, Iowa. Entering college at Morningside College he picked a degree in Graphic Arts with a minor in Mass Communications and Photography. His style of art was directly affected by Professor John Bowitz works and by studying the works of Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock. 

While earning his minor in photography he found that his subjects started to show he was influenced by the landscape around him and his father’s early farm based artworks. His work directly responds to the surrounding environment and uses his experience as an artist as a starting point. Often to frame instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. By applying abstraction, he touches on various overlapping themes. He loves working with textures and patterns created by the growth of nature and the erosion of man-made items and the processes that made them. 

By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, he investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination. Creating images that you can relate to emotionally.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website