A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture
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A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture |
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Los Angeles Artist and Portrait Painter 1949–2024 |
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The painter Stephen W. Douglas died in August 2024 after a months-long battle with cancer.
He became an important figure in the resurgence of figurative painting in Southern California’s contemporary art scene in the 1990s. Throughout his career, Douglas continued to expand ideas of what a portrait can do. He painted historical portraits, allegorical portraits, portraits of trees, and portraits of people ranging from Hollywood filmmakers to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Stephen W. Douglas was born in 1949 in Columbus, Ohio, to Nara and Otis Wayne Douglas. The family relocated to San Francisco, where Stephen attended Lick-Wilmerding High School, graduating in the class of 1967. He moved to Los Angeles to earn a BA from UCLA and later an MFA from USC. Douglas’s work has been exhibited at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Peter Blake Gallery, Peter Findlay Gallery, Washburn Mulvane Museum, Arnot Museum, Laguna Beach Museum, Frye Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, and many other institutions. His work is held in numerous private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Arnot Museum, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Vanderbilt University, Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, and Achenbach Foundation. Among other awards, in 2009 Douglas was named Garfield Lecturer in Painting and Drawing at the USC Roski School of Art.
For many years, Douglas lived in Santa Monica and worked in a studio in Venice. In 2005, his painting Rose to Windward was selected by the Venice Community Trust as the official poster of the Venice Centennial. Douglas once described his work as “an ongoing attempt to discuss a transcendent relationship with what surrounds all of us. The ability to do so is a record of how difficult it is to maintain a spiritual embrace of reality.” Douglas is survived by his wife, the photographer E. F. Kitchen, and by his work.
The Art of Stephen Douglas
Aside from the absolute physical painting virtuosity that Stephen accomplished over many years, it was also his spirit of inquiry that made his paintings so sublime. Stephen was not an artist to settle on a formula or simply work on previous successful achievements. He continued to push himself using philosophy, phenomenology and literature as well as touchstones for mastering painting to go beyond what he had last accomplished. You could easily sit down with Stephen on any given day and go through the differences and convergences between a Thomas Eakins painting and that of a contemporary artist such as Ann Gale and end up discussing the differences between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomology and Hans Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. It was the way that he kept his mind open both to content in representational painting and themes he was interested in. It was also Stephen’s characteristic way of keeping himself off balance so that he could paint even better. There can be different opinions but I would say that all you need to do is look at the way in which Stephen handled paint and color to understand that he is in a category of his own. He dedicated his life to striving with painting and representing the contemporary world in his work. Stephen Douglas taught us to look carefully at painting and this is the amazing gift he gave us with his art.
The fine art work of Stephen Douglas can be discovered on his website, Click Here, and on Instagram, Click Here.
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As a painter, Douglas was committed to the possibilities of the art of portraiture even when representational painting was out of fashion in the 1970s and ’80s. 
