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The Artist's Favorites
Updated and curated selection highlighting a few of the artist's favorites, and their backstories.
Untitled (2018) 8"x10" oil on board
Mr. Douglas often reuses his old paintings by scraping and repainting unsold canvases, or painting on the reverse side of panels. This small wooden panel was painted with leftover oil paint and represents one of the artist's first attempts at abstraction. His years as an antique dealer spurred his interest in textile patterns and primitive representation. His study of metaphysics and depth psychology began about a decade prior, but this marks the beginning of his experiments with intuitive drawing.
Mr. Douglas recalls, "I found this old painting on the reverse of a plein air landscape collecting dust on a shelf. I had forgotten about it, and barely remember having painted it. I often paint this sort of thing in a light trance state. I keep sketchbooks of ideas, and have years of dream journals from which I source material. But, I keep most of it private, as it isn't marketable locally. My abstract work skirts that boundary and often falls within the pale of decorative art."
The signature marks an early development of the mark he went on to use for years, and continues to return to occasionally in his current work. He generally signs abstract paintings on the reverse now, but at this time he was very new to the genre.
Backlots plein air (2021) 11"x14" oil on panel
Like the process of learning to paint portraits, learning to capture landscapes en plein air required years of practice and familiarity. This alley behind the artist's studio is one he painted a dozen or so times. The distant building is only notable architecture in the small town, and the curve of the pathway made for an interesting composition. Beyond the visual appeal of the scene itself, the backlots of small towns serve as a metaphor for the subconscious. They are not meant for public display...or for painting, they are lonely places where businesses leave their trash and turn away. There is a certain honesty and character to such places, in all such towns, and Mr. Douglas has always enjoyed exploring when he travels.
Self portrait (2023) 16"x20" oil on canvas
Portrait painting has always been one of Mr. Douglas's passions. Being self taught, it posed a great challenge, and each portrait presents new problems to examine. Portraits don't sell, and painting is expensive, so portrait painting is inherently absurd outside of an academic environment. Many amateur painters settle for using a grid to carefully plan their paintings and ensure accuracy. It was important to Jonathan to learn to understand the fundamentals of portraiture and commit them to memory.
To that end, Mr. Douglas began practicing self portraits from a mirror. Painting from life allows the most realistic and natural depth of color and light. At least it did before the advent of modern LCD high definition retina display monitors. Jonathan says of this, "In all honesty, I chose to paint from a mirror because it is more difficult, and to learn the way earlier painters did." This is one of his favorite portraits, completed in about two hours. He struggled through several dozen earlier paintings to reach the understanding to produce this one, and looks forward to learning more in years to come.
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Christmas in Vermont (2017) 11"x14"
acrylic on canvas panel
Mr. Douglas's painting output was sporadic from 2015-2018. He was working part time as a rural mail carrier, selling antiques, and struggling to find his identity as he accepted the yoke of adulthood. He shirked the pretension of academic painting, and experimented with acrylics and spray paint, working mostly from imagination. This painting resulted from that experimentation.
The figure on the left represents the artist, having recently decided to shave his thinning hair, expressing that infantile drive to hide from aging. His bald form is mirrored in the Christmas ornaments he is arranging, as a metaphor for the search for domestic life and happiness. The cell phone of Schroeder from the Peanuts cartoon mirrors the artist, and serves as a reminder of his aspirations to be a musician...and an artist. The Coca-Cola sign and the reclining nude figure on the orange duvet represent his emotional state, and echo the feeling of lost childhood.
A Christmas tree is seen obscured by half of a window, suggesting the alchemical union. The fourth wall of the house is gone completely, and the interior is laid bare. This is the meaning of the painting. This painting was not marketable and was subsequently painted over. Only the digital image, photographed with an iphone 5 remains.
Etz Chaim (2021) 36"x48"
oil on canvas
Painted during the dark days of the global pandemic, this painting was one of Mr. Douglas's first large scale oil paintings. He kept a series of a few dozen digital photos of an oak grove with particular sentimental attachment for five years, and they served as references for this and other oak tree paintings. There is still a naive attempt to depict minute details in this painting which his later style attempted to sophisticate. The branches of old trees serve as metaphors for the passage of time and cognition. The juxtaposition of the layers obscured by leaves as old memories are obscured by sentiment.
This painting was presented for sale at three venues separated by hundreds of miles. It seemed to escape notice amid the sensation of more alluring images. It isn't a dramatic painting, but it's an iconic record of a bygone time just like the tree itself. This was also one of the first paintings signed with the cartouche signature which Mr. Douglas uses more sparingly now on personal projects.
Chinese Lanterns (2022) 20"x20"
oil on canvas
This small and unassuming painting marks what the artist considers his first successful square composition. He studied rat theory for years before he began painting, and always understood things from the perspective of the rectangle. Rectangular shapes echo the human field of vision, and the square represents an anomaly. At the risk digressing into mysticism, Mr. Douglas says, "The essence of the square is a circle".
The elements of this painting effectively combine the artist's love of abstraction with a representational subject. Orange is his favorite color, but he's learned that it isn't popular with interior designers. This painting has a decidedly autumnal feeling (as was intended). Some of his earliest images from 2012/2013 were of dry grass, reeds, and corn husks, so this was a return to form. The shapes of the stalks have a very calligraphic feeling through the dark center of the image, like the spokes of a wheel.
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