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TOBY
MULLIGAN
Toby’s mantra both as an artist and as a person is to
pay attention to the world around him. Whatever we
need to know he believes we can go out and learn
ourselves thanks to the information revolution. The
challenge as he sees it is to identify what we want to
know; “once we have that straight, it’s all out there
for us.”
Unusually for an artist, Toby grew up in a world
where art was not a part of his day-to-day family life
growing up on a farm. Because of this he remembers
some landmark moments of discovery - hearing the
soaring high notes of the Albinoni Adagio, seeing
the Velasquez painting ‘The Water seller of Seville’,
reading an ingenious examination of materialism by
Roald Dahl - which made an intense impact on him.
Although he was unaware of it at the time, his life
as an artist was beginning to evolve through these
experiences, as he found himself overwhelmed and
“flooded with feeling that seemed to demand an
artistic response”. As he says:
THE THINGS YOU
ENCOUNTERASA
CHILD STAYWITH
YOU FOREVER.