Today we’d like to introduce you to Jonathan Douglas
Hi Jonathan, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I was interested in art from an early age. None of my family members were artists per se, but there was a lot of art appreciation and folk tradition in my life. My grandfather taught himself to draw while stationed in Japan during the second world war, and I was surprised to find very deftly executed images of palm trees and Japanese huts on note paper that he would throw away. My father was a dedicated amateur landscape photographer and my mother was an avid student of contemporary interior decorating. I learned a lot from both of them, informally through osmosis. There were always unspoken social rules involving class, race, and gender. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned why my grandfather threw away his drawings.
My mother opened a gift shop in the late 1980s after she and my father renovated an abandoned house in our small town. They had a photo album, of Polaroid pictures in a spiral binder, and one of the photographs was of my father falling through the floorboards of the porch. They always laughed about that. They called the shop Douglas Gallery, and the primary focus was on custom framing and art prints. This was the height of a popular art trend that saw artists like Thomas Kinkade, Anne Worsham Richardson, Bob Timberlake, and Jim Harrison launch careers painting and cleverly marketing regionalist kitsch. My mother used to tell stories of how she had the chance to buy Picasso prints but thought they were overpriced. She favored local artists over the expensive celebrity painters, and that proved a wise decision as the market on limited edition prints crashed in the mid 2000s.
I remember that my parents owned two watercolors by a local painter and had them prominently displayed in our living room. I never really thought much about them, they were fairly mundane subjects, one a still life and one a commissioned painting of an office building. Nonetheless, it was clear that these pictures were special, and that was reinforced on my young mind. Aside from the kitsch prints in my mother’s shop, I had no exposure to fine art aside from books and occasional school field trips. But even the exhibits we visited in school were mostly prints and amateur paintings. The only fine art paintings I saw were on a childhood trip to Washington DC, where we visited the Smithsonian. I still remember vividly the impression that Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy” had on me. The figures from the painting still occasionally appear in my dreams to this day.
As a teenager, I had books on Dali and MC Escher and I loved the sort of low art that graces the covers of fantasy novels and album covers. There was a bookstore we would visit in a mall about an hour north of town and I loved looking through the artwork of dragons and fantasy landscapes. But when it came to fine art, I was always at a loss. I read about Van Gogh and Monet and tried to appreciate it, but they just came off as pretentious and old fashioned. Still, I knew it was historically important and I tried to understand it. I studied Velasquez, El Greco, Caravaggio, Manet, and then the cubists, fauvists, Andy Warhol, and so forth. But I never quite grasped it until I started painting for myself.
My first attempts at painting were in High School and I wasn’t very good, but I enjoyed it. I sketched a bit in my early 20s, but spent most of my free time playing music…and video games. I think it was around 2012, at the age of 25 or so, that I returned to painting. My first experiments were on tiny pieces of matboard. I used acrylic paint because oil seemed too difficult and I was just trying to experiment for fun. I would paint and throw them away. I practiced for a year or so, and watched a lot of PBS painting shows trying to learn more about color theory. The only thing I really learned was that knowledge comes from learning but understanding comes from doing.
When I became more confident in my abilities, I would give paintings away to friends and family. I sold antiques at the time and decided to display paintings just to have something on the walls. Original art, even amateur art, wasn’t common back then and, when sold at auction, they tended to be out of my price range. So I painted my own, and discovered that people consistently asked about buying them, even if I didn’t include price tags. So, around 2010 I became a “professional” painter. As I sold paintings, I invested in better paints, and I began to devote more time every year to what had thitherto been a hobby. I was friends with a few retirees who were dedicated amateur artists and they ultimately convinced me to try oil painting.
At first I hated oil paint, and struggled to paint even the simplest landscape. I was comfortable with acrylics and continued to use them exclusively for the next four years or so. My late 20s were a very difficult time for me personally, and I lived through the sort of reckless abandon that many accomplish at a younger age in college. As I approached 30 I gradually started trying to get my life back in order, part of that included abandoning the naive style of acrylic painting I’d become comfortable with in exchange for more formal oil painting.
I experimented with watercolors, blockprinting, and spent several years driving around the rural countryside plein air painting along the shoulder of the road. All of those years of experimentation provided the same strictures that art schools impose on their students, it helped me to recognize my strengths and overcome my weaknesses. I found the technique I was most naturally suited to, oil painting in the studio, and I’m still learning the self-control to keep myself reigned in on the most pragmatic means of creating marketable work.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The only smooth roads seem to be slides to the bottom. I have been privileged by the color of my skin, and I recognize that, as well as recognizing the shame of having inherited this system which was founded and preserved by cruelty and exploitation. I try to remind myself of that terrible past when I want to complain, and I try to remember how minorities have endured without the freedom to speak out. But, I have struggled. I’ve struggled with practical issues of poverty, but more so with the psychological issues which are so common in this nation. To be an artist is to work with the mind, and it can be very wearisome.
I’ve had detractors from the beginning and only a few people who have genuinely encouraged me to keep going. I still get asked incredulously what I really do for a living. I have friends ask for favors and if I try to explain that I’m working, they inevitably respond with, “Oh you’re just painting”. Ironically I feel like I work much harder now than I ever did when I had a conventional job that was socially accepted as “hard work”. The difficulty is reassuring myself that I am doing something worthwhile and motivating myself to keep going when everyone tells me to quit.
The real crux of my dilemma, since leaving my conventional job to pursue art full time, has been preserving my creative integrity while keeping my work marketable. I have strong feelings and emotions, in private at least. But, when I paint I have to learn to integrate those feelings. I try to harness them like the eastern Yogi tries to harness the warring energies of the lower self. I’ve always been interested in metaphysics and alchemy, and this struggle to reconcile self expression with public perception is truly a hero’s journey and a rocky road.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am an oil painter. I paint primarily representational imagery, though I prefer abstraction. I started out focussing on impressionism, and gravitated towards academic realism. Nowadays I’m trying to, as John Lennon said, get back to where I once belonged. I’m most known for plein air painting the rural Carolina Sandhills, but for the past few years I’ve been focusing more on portraiture and figure painting. I don’t particularly enjoy painting wildlife, but that’s become a popular subject. I’m most proud of my progress in color theory and composition, which I’m continuing to hone. What sets me apart is my appreciation for esoteric symbolism. I’m very interested in the work of Kandinsky, Nicholas Roerich, and modern artists like Twombly and Julian Schnabel. Most of my fellow artists in the southeast paint kitsch unironically, but I try to be self aware, and sometimes wryly self effacing in my work.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
The presence of the spirit that I understand as God reflected in the fleeting light of recognition in the eyes of the beloved. It’s a difficult feeling to express in words, and is rather something that all artists try to paint. That’s what life means to me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jdouglasartist.com
- Instagram: @oakapplestudios
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oakapplestudios
