C DOUGLAS (1951)
C. Douglas was born in 1951 in Kerala. At twenty he joined the
Government College of Arts and Crafts inMadras.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.At the end of his days in
college, Douglas moved to a village founded by artists called
Cholamandal. He 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. Using mud, charcoal and watercolours on crinkling,
frayed paper, he arrived at a universalized figure that
approximates both subliminal depths and analysis, while with the
medium.In it indistinct but wide suggestions of personal and
general narratives, situations, values and art-historical
quotations add to a sense of an entire life journey. There blind
violence, sexual drive and passive progression, building,
reflecting, suffering, enduring and loving, decomposition and
rebirth, chaos and creativity coexist in a suspended fluidity
and simultaneity, all leaving traces on the torn, pierced,
collaged and crumpled paper, smoothed by charcoal, lead, crayons
and chalk. The artist lives and works in Chennai.
