Important Notice

C. Douglas, hailing from a coastal town far south, started as a painter at the age of twenty. That was his age in 1970 when he travelled to Madras to enroll himself at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, the premier art institution in South India. At that time he had completed school, been to college, read extensively and had even briefly apprenticed under the highly respected art master in his hometown. He seemed meek and was painfully... C. Douglas, hailing from a coastal town far south, started as a painter at the age of twenty. That was his age in 1970 when he travelled to Madras to enroll himself at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, the premier art institution in South India. At that time he had completed school, been to college, read extensively and had even briefly apprenticed under the highly respected art master in his hometown. He seemed meek and was painfully touchy. A career in art was thought of for him because there was nothing else he would put his mind on. That it should be at Madras was decided in the hope that good instruction and the company of artists would help him open up and make something of his temperament and abilities.

Happily for him, when he joined, the College of Art was an exciting place, full of interesting personalities. The painters and sculptors there had been involved in an important art movement, and some of them were doing their career's best work at that time. K.C.S. Paniker who had led the movement had just retired and moved to Cholamandal, the artist's village had founded. He was very much they're when Douglas also moved in there at the end of his days in college. The making of Douglas as the painter he is today has much to do with what he had received and continues to receive from the group he had been initiated into at these two places. But Douglas bided his time, reflected quietly on his own and waited for an exemplar. It was eventually to be Ramanujam, the demented draughtsman and painter, a former student at the college of art, whom Douglas kept seeing on and off at that place and later at Cholamandal.

Ramanujam was a highly eccentric and uncommunicative painter; even his most ardent admirer would be hard put to get to know anything of the working of his mind. But to Douglas he was that rare spirit who could picture the semi-sane, queerly formed state of being. Douglas's earliest exhibited work, done while he was still a student, showed how closely he had studied Ramanujam's workmanship. The way Ramanujam could flight his line, curdle it and pattern with it had made for a severely graphic style that carried Ramanujam's genius. This was what Douglas was trying to get a hold on. The style was a highly personal one, not unrelated however, to the expressionistic linearity that the artists at the college had evolved as a group. What was a disturbingly unspecific subject which in some instances seemed quite awesome. That started to be Douglas' apprehension too as he progressed with his own work in their midst.

His metaphor for it in his work of that period was the foetus, the pre-natal condition in which there is neither separation nor participation of any kind. His ability to flight the line and to figure figure freely with it was at play in the fragile personal myth he tried to hazard in the drawings of that period.

His shifting to Cholamandal confirmed him in his career as full time painter. It afforded him a place to stay, a companionship of others like him, the needed time for painting and together with them all, earning enough for minimum upkeep.

Douglas joined his fellow students there and some seniors who had moved in earlier, and carried on painting without being disturbed by any feelings of discontinuity or dislocation. He was twenty seven years of age when he became a professional like other notables in the trade and in free association with them. The time and situation were entirely right for equipping himself for the hardy professional work ahead in his career as a painter.

He now stared to 'paint' his pictures, instead of drawing and colouring them as he was doing so far. He proceeded to capture with brushwork and colour values, what he knew how to gather delicately with his flighted line and tints. This move warranted some reappraisal of his closely held perceptions of the subject and of its pictorial form. In the attempt, Douglas was inclined at first to make abstractions of it mathematising it with colour formulae, patterns, structure and rhythms. It would have been a heroic move at this stage to have tried to unify in one large conception the ill-formed, intimidating, aspect of his subject on one hand and the ordered feel of his intellect which he had been equally afflicted with. It might have occasioned some finality and brilliance if Douglas had been minded to work it to such a conclusion he might have attained maturity, wisdom and age with it.

But he clung to his habit of withholding himself, and would not allow his colour to light up and illumine his work. As he worked, the picture got dirtier and denser, adverting to the unlit, unruly apparition that hung over his vision. The formal devices in the painting, the grids, triangles, vertical and horizontal appeared so idealistic and unsubtle that they cleared nothing as they spanned his pictures. This series of paintings was done during his nine years stay in Europe, when he was cut off from fellow painters and long time associates. He must have painted them in desolation and without any force of feeling.

The disorientation, hurt and pain started to register in Douglas' painting towards the end of his stay abroad. They were no longer painted but stained, scribbled upon, muddied, excessively wrought and dense. On an impulse, he suddenly broke up his domicile abroad and returned home. Back to deprivation, but left alone in the artist's village, he could introspect freely and deliberate upon the unsettlement he had experienced. For a while after his return he appeared to be turning out in his pictures the little that was left of his idealism, and taking a fond last look at the linearity of his youthful days. In a short while a vague figure started to weigh in his pictures and it began to grow and take shape. His current series of paintings is what he has arrived at from those eerie beginnings after nearly a decade of self examination and reflection.

Douglas's figure is that of an unbeatable being, one that would be grateful not to have been brought forth at all. The way he vouches for it is expressive of his extraordinary meekness and tenderness of spirit. His artistry, finely drawn as it was at this stage, was to the fore as to turn the picture surface into the fictional ground or recess which his vexed figure might stay into and haunt. When his figure first appeared in his student days, there was little he could do to give it setting for lack of appropriate ground and over-all design. Such impediments have been worked through in recent years and his figure had been found in a variety of situations most of them, however, of a dark design.

Techniques for creating antinomies that the figure creates : figure and ground, inside and outside, space and mass, live and inert and so on, have been developed and reworked from time to time, including most recently in the expressionist revival. The issue apparently is one of that stays open all the same, leaving it to the spirit of one workmanship to effect some kind of finish in instances. Douglas, for his part, stayed free of the plastered finish of oils on canvas, worked instead with chalk and crayons on crumpled and muddied paper glued on cloth. He stuck to unobtrusive colours: gray-browns and blacks which kept thickening and receding as he worked his pictures to finish. These detours helped him to arrive at an uneasy middle ground and possessively gone over and over again until the picture was exhausted and done. In that kind of finish Douglas is able to achieve in his late works in figure turns decidedly picturesque. It turns out in the end to be amazingly constant, only a great deal more pictorial than at the beginning when he thought he was no more than seeded and conceived to be.

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