Please ring to view 020 8464 5816
Douglas Gray:
4th January to 9th February 2018
Open evening 4th January 7-9pm
An orderly and rational structure underlies my paintings, but I apply colour in an intuitive, non-rational way. I think of each one of my paintings as being a self-contained world, where pure line and colour can promote an emotional response, transcending the formal reality of the painting to suggest an otherness – something mysterious.
I first became interested in non-representational painting while at secondary school, after seeing a reproduction of one of Piet Mondrian’s paintings. I might not have understood it, but I was entranced by the boldness and deceptive simplicity of the primary colours and black grid lines over the white spaces: a self-contained, perfect, and yet mysterious world.
Later, during the second year of my foundation course at Harrow School of Art in the early 1970s, I became aware of the minimalist artists and the paintings of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland, and began experimenting with large, shaped canvases.
But it was during my diploma course at Canterbury College of Art, that I first saw a reproduction of Systems painter Michael Kidner’s panting ‘Orange, Blue and Green’ which has probably been the biggest influence on my subsequent paintings. That painting employs stripes that cross each other to create a mesmerising Moire effect, which seems to me to suggest something illusory and mysterious.
An orderly and rational structure underlies my paintings, but I apply colour in an intuitive, non-rational way, which, as the colours interact with each other, may sometimes undermine or obscure that underlying structure: the conflict between order and chaos, perhaps? I think of each one of my paintings as being a self-contained world, where pure line and colour can promote an emotional response, transcending the formal reality of the painting to suggest an otherness – something mysterious.
Biography
I was born in Hammersmith in 1952 and my family moved to South Harrow around 1957/58.
Upon leaving secondary modern school in 1969 I enrolled as a full-time student in Foundation Studies at Harrow School of Art, where I gained a Certificate in Foundation Studies.
From 1971-1974 I studied painting at Canterbury College of Art in Kent, where I gained a Dip. A.D. in Fine Art (Painting).
After leaving art college I drifted away from fine art. I worked in several manual jobs until the mid nineteen eighties when I began working as a layout artist, designing pages for a nationally distributed retail catalogue. I continued in that line of work until November 2014 when I decided to take early retirement, in order to concentrate on painting.
Most of my student work at Canterbury had been abstract/non-representational, however, when my interest in art was rekindled in the late nineteen-eighties, I tended towards a more figurative style; working mostly in pencil, colour pencil and watercolour to draw still-life and surrealistic landscapes.
I became a member of The Society for Art of the Imagination between 2002 to 2007, and was represented in four of their annual exhibitions over that period. I also exhibited drawings in two open exhibitions, held in 2005 and 2006, at the Royal Society of Birmingham Artists gallery.
However, I began to feel dissatisfied with the figurative work I was producing. I felt the sense of mystery I was trying to evoke could be achieved in a better and more direct way through non-representational paintings, which do not have the ‘literary’ distraction of representational pictures. My work now is almost exclusively non-representational.