top of page
Personal Projects
Updated and curated selection highlighting a few of my favorite paintings, and their backstories.
Untitled (2018) 8"x10" oil on board
I often reuse my old paintings by scraping and repainting unsold canvases, or painting on the reverse side of panels. This small wooden panel was painted with leftover oil paint and represents one of my first attempts at abstraction. My years as an antique dealer spurred my interest in textile patterns and primitive representation, and study of metaphysics and depth psychology began about a decade prior. This marks the beginning of my experiments with intuitive drawing.
I found this old painting on the reverse of a plein air landscape collecting dust on a shelf. I had forgotten about it, and barely remember having painted it. I often paint this sort of thing in a light trance state. I keep sketchbooks of ideas, and have years of dream journals from which I source material. But, I keep most of it private, as it isn't marketable locally. My abstract work skirts that boundary and often falls within the pale of decorative art.
The signature marks an early development of the mark I went on to use for years, and continue to return to occasionally in my current work. I generally sign abstract paintings on the reverse now, but at this time I was very new to the genre.
Backlots plein air (2021) 11"x14" oil on panel
Like the process of learning to paint portraits, learning to capture landscapes en plein air required years of practice and familiarity. This alley behind my studio is one I've painted a dozen or so times. The distant building is only notable architecture in the small town, and the curve of the pathway makes for an interesting composition. Beyond the visual appeal of the scene itself, the backlots of small towns serve as a metaphor for the subconscious. They are not meant for public display...or for painting, they are lonely places where businesses leave their trash and turn away. There is a certain honesty and character to such places, in all such towns.
Self portrait (2023) 16"x20" oil on canvas
Portrait painting has always been one of my passions. Being self taught, it posed a great challenge, and each portrait presents new problems to examine. Portraits aren't in demand, and painting is expensive, so portrait painting is inherently absurd outside of an academic environment. Many amateur painters settle for using a grid to carefully plan their paintings and ensure accuracy. It was important to me to learn to understand the fundamentals of portraiture and commit them to memory.
To that end, I began practicing self portraits from a mirror. Painting from life allows the most realistic and natural depth of color and light. At least it did before the advent of modern LCD high definition retina display monitors. In all honesty, I chose to paint from a mirror because it is more difficult, and to learn the way earlier painters did. This is one of my favorite portraits, completed in about two hours. I struggled through several dozen earlier paintings to reach the understanding to produce this one, and looks forward to learning more in years to come.
.jpg)
Christmas in Vermont (2017) 11"x14"
acrylic on canvas panel
My painting output was sporadic from 2015-2018. I was working part time as a rural mail carrier, selling antiques, and struggling to find my identity as I accepted the yoke of adulthood. I shirked the pretension of academic painting, and experimented with acrylics and spray paint, working mostly from imagination. This painting resulted from that experimentation.
The figure on the left represents me, having recently decided to shave my thinning hair, expressing that infantile drive to hide from aging. My bald form is mirrored in the Christmas ornaments I am arranging, as a metaphor for the search for domestic life and happiness. The cell phone of Schroeder from the Peanuts cartoon mirrors me, serving as a reminder of my aspirations to be a musician...and an artist. The Coca-Cola sign and the reclining nude figure on the orange duvet represent my emotional state, and echo the feeling of lost childhood.
A Christmas tree is seen obscured by half of a window, suggesting the alchemical union. The fourth wall of the house is gone completely, and the interior is laid bare. This is the meaning of the painting. This painting was not marketable and was subsequently painted over. Only the digital image, photographed with an iphone 5 remains.
Solomon's Folly (2021) 24"x24"
oil on canvas
This is another early experiment in neo-expressionism. Here, I made use of intentional symbols, like the Muladhara, Swadhisthana, the Starbucks logo, and the repeated motif of the breton stripes and rainbow. For me, the stripes represent the crown of ancient Egypt, and the stripes of a zebra. One of my earliest memories is of nearly choking to death on a mozzarella cheese stick in a cafeteria during a visit to a zoo as a small child. The walls were painted with zebra stripes, and that has always signaled danger and constriction for me. I've moved consciously away from that use, because many viewers mistake the shape for piano keys. That's the dilemma of modern art, and the reason the color field painters of the 20th century abandoned representational imagery altogether.
This image was also an early example of layering and excavating earlier images, such as the kidney shape of the "dog" and the spiraling patterns. Like many such images, this one was ultimately obliterated, but remains among my favorites for its effective blending of styles in an harmonious composition. The shapes of the trees on the right, inspired in part by classical depictions of funerary cypresses, recurred in my paintings from 2017-2021.
Self Portrait with an Anthropomorphic Bee (2025) 18"x24"
oil on canvas
This was a return to a style I enjoy, but which has little commercial viability. This might be classed as art brut, or simply outsider art. I've painted this way from an early age, long before learning about any formal schools of painting. There are more formalized aspects of this painting that aren't seen in my earlier work. The figures are arranged more thoughtfully and attention is given to elegance of form and a degree of finish.
I painted this on a very coarse toothed canvas, without my usual neutral toning. Subsequently, I had no choice but to apply the paint quite thickly, and the stark white made the yellows and purples more vivid. The difficulty of the surface itself also presented an obstacle for smooth or detailed mark making, which made delicate patterns impractical.
I set out with the intention of depicting a memory of a friend who had a bee allergy and a justifiable fear of bees. I wanted to depict my own naivete, my own allergy to intimacy and vulnerability itself. The elfin features of my self portrait, suggesting the myth of the changeling, only half human. There's a line dividing my cranium, as the two hemispheres of the brain, or the twin experiences of the inner world and the gestalt. The hands of the bee figure, as flower petals, are partly due to my abstract understanding of form and foreshortening, and also a symbol of the affinity for human connection.
The four quadrants of the canvas can bee seen as Jungian quaternity, with the fiery sheaves of grain on the right leading up into an organic pattern inspired by the wings of butterflies. There is a recurring circle or target shape that he uses, it can be interpreted as eyes or orifices but for him it's more like the holes of lotus seed heads. A symbol for thought. The leaves become vines or tendrils on the sinister side, suggesting the soft murmur of intuition. And beneath us are the feminine waters of emotion.
The bee figure is depicted above the water, while I dissolve into it. The water itself forms a boundary between us, though the figure's arm attempts to cross that. The yelllow breton stripe, the bee pattern, suggests a landscape and fecundity of the figure from which the flowers grow. My shirt, by contrast, is a russet plaid, symbolizing a fence and a barrier to the bee figure and her world.
Post Industrial Isis (2026)
oil on canvas
This was painted spontaneously with no preliminary studies or plan. That's always a risk and a challenge for me. I'm not a very spontaneous person, so it goes against my nature, but I've found this technique to be the most conducive to sincere expression. Carl Jung wrote that this method is the most psychologically revealing, and I've found that to be the case. If given the time to plan and prepare, I usually correct mistakes beforehand, and it's those mistakes that provide the most insight into me as an artist. After all, that's what art is supposed to be about.
A friend of mine once told me that all of my portraits look like me, and that's the intention. They serve as a mirror and a way to see myself in others, even when those others have little in common with me. This figure is meant to represent Isis and other goddesses of early mythology, like Ishtar and Athena. The infant Horus is swaddled in a pattern of Walmart logos and surrounded by four stylized forget-me-nots which echo that theme. The pyramid on the left was cropped slightly in the photograph, but includes 13 bricks and represents the breast of Isis giving nourishment from the desert. The form of the infant's head is haloed by the circle formed from the arch and pyramid and bicycle handlebars.
The three frogs at the bottom are borrowed from an earlier painting of mine, and are a medieval representation of Satan; that is of danger, adversity, mischief. The bicycle is heading towards them, but the geometry is mangled and out of control. The broken handlebars suggest the unseen presence of departed Osiris...the shadow of the fallen Patriarchy. The tires form the shield of Athena, or can be seen as a doubled glyph of Mars which is another symbol I use frequently (and related to Osiris). The Nike shoe on the left echoes the wing of Isis and is poised above a break in the pavement beneath which the water of the spirit flows. The latter was taken from a recurring dream image, and the shoe itself is a reference to the Heaven's Gate cult.
Natural images of grass (stylized as the hebrew yod) and deer tracks indicate the intuition, while the images of bees suggest the intellectual faculty giving order to it. The moths at the top represent the black and white witch moths of South American folklore, and serve as angelic symbols above the arch. The star of David both represents the modern nation state of Israel, with all it's crimes and excesses, and the star of Ishtar flanked by the honeycomb. Honey, for me, represents the hermetic union.
The Coke sign and red stripes represent that same alchemizing process for making honey from the union of opposites. Likewise the rainbows in the hair and the stylized numeral 7 suggest the goddess as operating in a sphere above the mundane. Serene before the dangers, and bringing Horus into the world like the later St. Mary. The colorful shapes to the left of the figure represent cathedral windows, which is a symbol I've used for nearly a decade now to represent the incarnate intellect, or the Word made flesh.
This image represents America as deeply and fundamentally flawed, but capable of redemption by the next generation. An America that won't be made great by violence or strength, but by composure and patience. It is a reminder that Nature triumphs over all, and our myopic views of good and evil are like moth wings in the hurricane of time. Like many before, this image was obliterated and will be used as the ground for a more marketable abstract painting.
© 2025 J Douglas
bottom of page