Ed Douglas
New Paintings from the adirondacks and Maine
May 7th -30th
Ed Douglas began his fine arts education at the Rhode Island School of Design earning a BFA . He then attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, and received his MFA. Until his retirement, Douglas taught drawing and painting at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine where he was Chair of the art department. His work is a palette of beautiful color combinations academically and thoughtfully laid to surface. He derives inspiration from classic Impressionist masterpieces. Douglas maintains a residence in Maine spending summers in Essex, New York.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The title of this show refers to the location of the two studios where I work. I usually paint in series, some I’m still working on are in this show: Summer Window views and Covid Memories, to name a couple. The most recent paintings are of the Palisades fires in California, a series that began earlier when I saw a healthy tree with a broken top in my back yard, not knowing it would show up as a series, or that the extreme contrast of the fires would lead to paintings that used mainly black and white palette and geometric grid, a restricted formal structure I did not follow in the newest painting, Palisades X.
Another series is landscapes done from the balcony of my summer studio showing a dark void at the edge of a mowed field that I imagined as a miniature black hole. A real massive black hole is at the center of our galaxy and countless other galaxies throughout the universe. Regardless of the sources, be they nature, memories, events, other paintings, or even my readings in astrophysics, all have a short life that can’t take the place of a lifelong disciplined studio schedule. When Woody Allen was asked what attributed to his success he answered, “Just showing up”.
It’s a challenge to explain my own work and process, but nothing compares to the downright weird world of quantum mechanics and astrophysicists who combine the smallest of the small with the immensity of the universe and claim all matter is interactive, vibrating waves of quanta—perhaps strings , as in string theory—that behave as random possibilities and uncertainties, where entangled electrons are everywhere before being detected somewhere by an observer who not only compromises calculations but changes reality by seeing particles up close and unable to see its larger totality. Add this hubris that can cloud and skew results of any creative process, it’s impossible to separate out the self (ego) knowing what’s involved is making mistakes, poor judgment and dead ends that are always, it seems, “deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling,” to quote T.S. Eliot.
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