BULLET HOLES REMISSION AND ROMANCE

• 2013-05-22

  

  (‘twilight sundries’ Douglas Donald McDougall > 100cm x 140cm charcoal on 300gm Snowdon cartridge)

  (My medium is charcoal/graphite on 300gsm Snowdon Cartridge, it’s a combination of drawing/painting/sculpture with a nod towards the discipline of ‘trompe l’oeil’. An ongoing tribute to the classical history of drawing. Being very much influenced in my early years by the vision, technical prowess and theatre conjured by select masters such as Caravaggio, Guthrie, Rembrandt and Velázquez, i now find myself pushing to hunt down and encapsulate the almost jolting theatre of ambiance evoked when viewing a classical masterpiece. The real purpose or vocation in this art, my art, is to try and unleash some of that haunting historical beauty. Excavate with a purpose so that it links to the very atmospheric of the vivid memories i have as a young boy viewing such works for the very first time. To manage the sublime emotion, press on and encourage the wizard of a fresh new dynamic. Take the classical drawing medium of charcoal on paper and push it to an absolute extreme. Is the order of my days..)

• 2013-05-09

  

  creation station..
  

• 2012-12-13

  

  (‘garbed for disco’ Douglas Donald McDougall >100cm x 70cm charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge)

  (‘by carving into the paper in a particular way, one can feel the power and the magic and the luck. The face is a mirror of the soul - for better or worse. Portraiture is my way of encapsulating and understanding the ongoing museum of human experience, to show who we really are, body and spirit’..)

  You could say that Douglas D McDougall is a geographer of the human face and psyche. Charcoal driven perceived notions in phrenological/psychoanalytical surrealism is the method in which he records the life of these chosen subjects. In his most recent series “A New God”, Theo (the bearded one) is the Devil’s advocate out to confront new age society’s ails. Like the anthropomorphic being Golem (from Jewish folklore), or modern day Frankenstein, he is mobilized and pushed out into the forum to confront the only God in man that can lead us through this ever perpetuating paradigm. Inside and outside of who we are and what we do to one another as the primary species. The mark of man’s ‘ego’ has always set the terms, ploughed the patterns of education, construction of life and deconstruction within the human evolutionary pathway. ‘Wisdom imagination and willpower’ is the only true God, everything else is just everything else. You are your New God..

  interview with The Raw book > http://therawbook.com/Douglas-McDougall

• 2012-12-11

  

  ‘tubercular souls reach out from the apathy, an assembly line of phantom pain’ (14cm aperture) Douglas Donald McDougall, graphite on 140gsm  Seawhite cartridge

  
  

• 2012-12-04

  

  ‘the daily grid’  Douglas Donald Mcdougall, 22cm x 22cm charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge.

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  (‘garbed for disco’) August 2011 Edinburgh studio

• 2012-11-17

  

  (‘umbilical’ Douglas Donald McDougall > 42cm x 59cm  charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge)

• 2012-11-11

  

  (‘outcasts never stagger’ Douglas Donald McDougall > (14cm aperture) graphite on 140gsm Seawhite cartridge)

• 2012-11-10

  

  ( mona’theo’relations (‘garbed for disco’) Douglas Donald McDougall > 70cm x 100cm charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge)

• 2012-11-06

  

  (‘capricious love’ Douglas Donald McDougall > 140cm x 100cm charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge)

  I was born 1963 to Scottish parents in the seaside town of Blackpool Lancashire, North West England. Blackpool at the cusp of the sixties was a UK tourist hotspot that attracted holidaying Brits from the four corners of the British Isles. Famous for its steel built tower, very much inspired by the Eiffel Tower of Paris, and long beach with a promenade of bustling entertainment venues adorned in multi coloured neon illumination. My father was an electrician who was qualified in erecting and maintaining neon signage, so this pretty much seemed like the perfect destination to set up shop and start a family.
  My mother was afflicted by an acute case of post natal depression directly after giving birth to me, and i was never to bond with her. At the age of five i was struck down with a blood disorder that had me in and out of hospital for over four years. It was at the very start of this period when my parents decided to split and my father took me back up to Scotland.To his hometown of Glasgow. By this time my father’s business had spread nationwide, meaning he was now having to travel all over the country, so the job of my upbringing was passed over to close relatives.

  Yes, art kicked in early for me. I became an avid scribbler on hospital time, not in your standard child viewed portal of innocent spontaneity by way of crayon houses n glitter rainbow skies. No, in many ways i focussed on my immediate environment and in a more creative occupational therapy mould to compensate for the needles, plastic tubes, bed baths and removal of my natural parents. There was an almost daily routine of what i suppose you could call creative surrogacy, a facility that helped mask the intimacy deficit that played in tandem with the ever jarring piercing stark world of hospital interiors.

• 2012-10-30

  

  (‘devil is in the detail’ (detail) Douglas Donald McDougall > graphite on 140gsm Seawhite cartridge) 

  
  For the next eight years i was brought up in a particularly disenchanted household. My Aunt and Uncle were both heavy drinkers and gradually becoming deeply unhappy in their marriage. Within a couple of years of living there i began to witness my Uncle spending as much time at his business and away from home as he could possibly muster. All the while my Aunt was back at the house lost in a world of suspicion and drunken misery. Soon i was to be looked upon as the burden and quickly became the whipping post and outlet for her vent to all related frustrations. Many an early evening, having been sent up to my room sometimes as early as 6pm, i would spend at my bedroom window watching school friends enjoy their 2hrs of pre bedtime freedom. This wasn’t so much a childhood, but more of a quietly alarming and all too extended incarceration. Almost remarkable that i was allowed, to keep in my room, the conciliation of paper and pencils..the solitary remaining grace. 

  Most weekends my father would either visit briefly or to my utmost joy find the time to whisk me away for the day. He would often take me to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum to look at the paintings. He admired the portrait painters especially, with his particular favourites being ‘old Willie’ by James Guthrie and Rembrandts ‘a man in armour’. The visceral terms in which Guthrie rendered his subject matter was, at that time, one of the most poignant cultural experiences my eyes had witnessed. And the way in which Rembrandt realized lucidity in defining this static metalic emblem of war was to me utterly mind blowing in its ethereal vision. Experiences such as this were much needed relief from my week long torments. These precious moments of colourful inspirational respite were very much the first pivotal marker point which planted the initial seed of my future interest in becoming a portrait artist.

• 2012-10-24

  

  (‘despite myself i’m a god’ Douglas Donald Mcdougall > 70cm x 59cm charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge) 

  My upbringing being wholly an old fashioned affair was never going to be encouraging enough nor conducive for my appetite in creativity. Gaining a ‘realistic’ trade and earning a ‘decent’ living was very much the importance of the day. So whatever encouragement i was given at school to persue a career in art. I tended to shy away from through certain insecurities and lack of belief that contemporary life could be realistically sustainable through the practice of art. When i left my secondary education it was with monumental relief, everything up until that stage had been mostly enclosures, discipline, strict regimes administered via earnest faces. So i took to my prize of immediate freedom with a new found aplomb and direct abandon. I was now living with my father, and this wasn’t a comfortable situation for either of us. There was guilt, but he was never to fully understand what was sacrificed through the pain i endured living with his miserable sister. And i pretty much didn’t care too much for authority now, and proceeded to rebel through my remaining teen life. It would be another 12 years before my interest in art fully rekindled.

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  (‘mining’ (detail) 42cm x 59cm Douglas Donald McDougall charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge)

• 2012-10-23

  

  (‘hillbilly probed’ 42cm x 59cm Douglas Donald McDougall charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge)

• 2012-10-20

  

  (garbed eye) ‘garbed for disco’ (detail) Douglas Donald McDougall 70cm x 100cm charcoal on 300gsm Snowdon cartridge)

  I took on many jobs after leaving school and apart from a year spent with a design group, where i got to put down a bit of illustration work, my jobbing history was quite literally turning out to be a bit of a mixed bag of unwanted tricks. The longest term of employment i had was with an Optical glazing company, cutting prescription lenses for spectacles. Three years in on that ship and if it hadn’t been for the demise of the company along with a little redundancy bounty, the impetus to be seriously creative may never have been unearthed again. So take the goodwill money and run. A vacation away from the usual humdrum for a few weeks would be the very medicine. Myself and a good friend Tom decide on a backpacking trip across Europe > this would be my first foot outside Britain. Not long into the adventure it was decided the trip turn into more of a southerly attack through Holland, France and then down to southern Spain. And it was all going pretty famously until around 10 weeks in when the funding started drying up. I remember we were making our way back up the east coast of Spain, stopping off at Lloret de Mar to see if we could pick up some casual labour. We contemplated taking on work as bar help and vacancies were found, but it seemed the proprietors were a bit too enthusiastic to pay us mostly in alcohol rather than hard cash > certainly not the type of gig that would be steering us back to dry land anytime soon! The following afternoon i brought out my trusty rotring isograph pen set, sat myself in a little public square and began drawing. Over the next 3 days i produced half a dozen works of improvisational strangeness drawn on A4 photocopy paper. We moved further north to a little place on the French Spanish border called Cerbère, which lies on the coastline around 25mls north of Port Lligat, famously known as Salvador Dali’s preferred place of residence. While there i photocopied the work many times over and then found another place to sit and draw some more. The copies began selling and i was picking up a healthy little audience too. Things were starting to feel rather fine. We decided to head further north up the French Mediterranean coast, stopping off at the port of Sète for a while. The annual water jousting festival was in full swing when we hit town.This is a bizarrely entertaining ritual that first established itself there in 1666 to mark the founding of the port. The place was simply flooded with tourists sitting along the waterfront watching the vibrant longboats filled with people dressed all in white, determined to force their opposing parties into taking an early bath. Enjoying myself immensely, i sat myself down and got straight to work. Almost overnight the penny dropped and it dawned on me that i actually held the ability to produce something that people were more than willing to enthuse over and buy into. That summer of 1991 was the first time in my life i gained a much welcomed increment of self-belief..