Interview with Artist Douglas O. Smith

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Interview with Artist Douglas O. Smith
Hwy 62 Open Studio Art Tours 2015

Douglas Oliver Smith, a painter of meditative nudes and joyful, colorful abstractions, came to the Morongo Basin art scene in October, 2013. Prior to that, he spent years developing his talents as a painter and musician in Pittsburg, New York City, and, most recently, outside of Seattle, Washington. In his short time in Twentynine Palms, California – Doug’s studio is in the former Roadside Attractions Gallery on Highway 62 -- he is building a reputation as a high-spirited, charismatic performer who goes wherever his inner voice leads him. He brings a similar free-spirited approach to an art which reflects his highly personal encounter with Vipasana meditative practice and a life-long obsession with spontaneous, open forms that never become frozen in preconceived ideas about the nature of art.

George Howell: How does Vipasana and meditation inform your approach to painting?

Douglas O. Smith: I think it's had quite an influence on my life. For a lot of years, I suffered through depression and self-doubt, and I pretty much talked myself out of accomplishing anything with my art. So the meditation actually helped me to open myself up to possibilities, of leaving those misconceptions behind. And as a consequence, the meditation has also opened up my channels of receptivity to the world. I became more open to life and wanted to partake in life in a very positive fashion.

GH: Do you find yourself more open to what happens at the moment while you paint because of the meditative process?

DOS: That is exactly it. It has helped me to stay more in that moment and it's helped me to focus on what's at hand. And, what's interesting enough, it's also helped me to really enjoy the simple fact of painting. It really has allowed me to feel, sometimes, joyful.

 GH: When I first met you, you talked about switching over to abstract painting. You'd done a lot of figurative painting before. Now, naturalism tends to be more focused on looking at the world outside, and abstraction tends to be more internal. How would you describe your older paintings?

DOS: As a young person, I actually started out admiring and working in purely abstract art. So in a lot of ways, I'm coming full circle back to it. I feel I went on a journey to work with naturalism, working with the outside world and really enjoyed that. I still do. But before moving here, I had these quick snapshot dreams of large abstract paintings with really light colors, beautiful colors, and so those dreams actually inspired me to move here. I still work from the model, but I'm actually working part abstraction and part naturalism. And there's something I find so enjoyable about working with a simple form.

GH: How did you respond to the figure drawing sessions held in your studio last year?

DOS: Well, it was interesting. Someone had asked if I could host the life drawing here because I have this space, which I'm renting. And I thought, for sure, why not? And I was really working a lot at that point with abstraction and I thought, well, I'll just work in the studio and I'll come out and maybe do a drawing in the class once in a while. Well, I became very much enamored with the figure. So it was interesting how enjoyable it was. Suddenly, instead of having to capture a likeness perfectly, I was more excited about the form. As a consequence, the drawing was easier and more enjoyable. And so I then would do these drawings and the forms in a two-hour, pretty quick session, and then bring them into the studio and start to work with the color and I had the greatest time, it was just so enjoyable to do that.

GH: You sometimes joke that you paint like Kandinsky. Kandinsky looked at abstraction as the purest way to express an artist's inner truth and he also thought about abstract painting as having the expressive power of music. How does music influence your painting?

DOS: Yeah, I think they're so closely related. People will say, “Oh, Doug's singing the blues” and somebody, an old blues man, said, “I don't play the blues to stay in the blues, I play the blues to get out of the blues.” And that's the way I feel about painting, and with whatever I do. I'm saying that right from the get-go because I'm doing it to feel joyful. And so I feel that with the color. I really can't find anything more joyful than juxtaposing different shapes and colors and finding harmonies, and sometimes things that aren't harmonious, and putting them together and Kandinsky was a master at that. Sometimes I look at his forms, I find that, wow, that's really a wild juxtaposition. But there's a sense of exhilaration to his work, almost like an ecstasy in a way, and I find that with him and Klee and Calder, Brancusi, there's almost a point that they're reaching towards the sublime, in their forms and shapes and color. So color can accomplish that, and narrative painting can also accomplish that. Somehow now I'm feeling called to do it with forms that aren't imbued with any sort of narrative. Somehow that feels really open to me. And I feel that way with the music right now. I feel excited to actually break open the narratives that I've gotten used to in a way.

GH: So we've been talking about your paintings being, for the most part, abstract even when there's figurative elements within them. But I know you were really upset by the incident in Ferguson, Missouri, and police violence against young black men. How did that affect you, and do you think that in some way, art can change the world?

DOS: The few pieces that I did came about as an emotional response to the almost weekly occurrence of another person getting shot, often from the African-American community. Just heart breaking, purely heart breaking. I just felt somehow I had to do something, even in a very small way. And so I ended up doing these kind of altar pieces, commemorations of these lives. I'd never met any of these people personally, but I felt it was an emotional response. I don't think that these pieces have affected that many people. But it was something I felt I had to do. I think that art can create a wonderful change. I think that art can do it through protest or somehow through these emotions, and somehow it can change the world because it also offers a state of imagination and creativity which I believe firmly is our greatest hope. That is, that we'll find the joy in our lives in order to not turn to destructive modes of being. And that is through the creative impulse, the joy of life. So I think art can offer its greatest message by allowing the human mind to perhaps see other strategies in dealing with life.

GH: How did people respond to these altar pieces?

DOS: Favorably. I had a version of it at the Joshua Tree Art Festival and people did get to see it there. The word I've gotten back is that people found something to touch base with. And there's been some people from the African-American community that have stopped by. I think it's, maybe in a small way, good for them to at least see that somebody's caring about these things, also. Because I think that we need to share the fact that we care about these common things that hurt us as a community, not just black, white or whatever, but us as a total. Especially showing, in my small way, concern and caring about these things.

GH: You've portrayed yourself as a painter who is using art to delve into emotions that are personal to you, but ones that other people can very much share in. Is there anything else that's important to you about your work that we haven't talked about?

DOS: Yes, there was something that I just wanted to add, and that's going back to a question of how the meditation has related to me doing this work. And I realize, now after our questions at the end, that probably the greatest thing that I've learned is to allow myself to see glimpses of our interconnectedness to everything. And when I say glimpses, I'm not always in touch with that because I'm dealing with the day-to-day, just like everybody else is. But there are times when I feel this state of interconnectedness, so I can then feel something about something that happened across the world and to feel connected to it. And so the meditation has opened up those channels for me in a much more . . . let's put it this way, over the years I've found plenty of things to be hurt by and it's often hard to open the heart when things are feeling hurtful, so it is actually helping me to open up my heart again, to feel the channels of connecting and so it's helped in these subtle, but very strong ways with the art and music because that, of course, is what I believe is the channel of creativity, to actually try to connect with others through it.

George Howell, an artist and writer living in Wonder Valley, collaborates with Douglas O. Smith on his musical adventures.