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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 aren't in demand, 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 him 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. He 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.
Solomon's Folly (2021) 24"x24"
oil on canvas
This is another early experiment in neo-expressionism. Here, the artist made use of intentional symbols, like the Muladhara, Swadhisthana, the Starbucks logo, and the repeated motif of the breton stripes and rainbow. For Douglas, the stripes represent the crown of ancient Egypt, but he moved consciously away from that use, because many viewers mistake it for piano keys. That's the dilemma of modern art, and the reason the color field painters of the 20th century abandoned representational imagery altogether.
This image was also an early example of layering and excavating earlier images, such as the kidney shape of the "dog" and the spiraling patterns. Like many such images, this one was ultimately obliterated, but remains among the artist's favorites for its effective blending of styles in an harmonious composition. The shapes of the trees on the right, inspired in part by classical depictions of funerary cypresses, recurred in his paintings from 2017-2021.
© 2025 J Douglas
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