Eric Leo Baggaley

Prints

Born in Moss Side, Manchester, Eric Leo Baggaley went to the Salesian College, Shrigley Park, Macclesfield to train as a missionary. Over thirty years later, a priest and teacher, he left the order to continue in education. With degrees in both divinity and modern languages he taught in secondary schools for 28 years, becoming Head of Department. Following his early retirement he worked for six years as counsellor and trainer with Relate, while following art as a serious hobby.

It was during 1993 to 1995, when he was being tutored by Sheffield-based artist and printmaker, Peter Gillies, that Baggaley's own passion for printmaking began. He pursued this through an Art and Design B.Tech Foundation course at Chesterfield College of Art before specialising in fine art printmaking at MMU (Manchester Metropolitan University), from 1997 to1999.

His first two solo exhibitions, Stairway and Trunk and Found Objects were held in 1999 in the Geoffrey Manton atrium at MMU and Righton Gallery respectively. It was during the creative process of devising these shows that he developed his distinctive style. He says "I have found that one of the creative processes which interests me most is that where you take a very concrete, specific form of imagery and push shapes and colours taken from the original inspiration through a fairly relentless series of transformations. The final images may well appear at first sight to be very far removed from the original images, yet these are contained in there somewhere. I do not see the resulting images as abstract art -- but rather as art which is an abstract of the original".

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