Join us on Sunday, August 21, from 11-1pm for a painting demonstration and artist talk with painter and performer, Douglass Truth.
Biography
Douglass Truth is a painter, writer, and performer.
Born in 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana, into a family famous for its mechanics, bricklayers, and lawyers, Douglass Truth was cursed from the beginning with a heightened sensibility combined with very poor taste. Attempts at remedial education throughout the years have met with uncertain results, leaving him with a reputation as mixed as his media.
He has worked as a civil engineering designer and surveyor during the pipeline years in Alaska, a chef, building dismantler, English teacher, and as a software salesman in Taiwan. He owned and operated a graphic design and silk-screen company, Flying Turtle Graphics, supplying his own unique designs on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and posters.
Truth began painting in 1996, and has been represented by galleries in California, Arizona, Indiana, New York, and Connecticut.
After a serious illness in 1998 Truth closed his business in order to devote himself entirely to painting and writing. “After such a confrontation, or voyage, or whatever it was,” he said, “you find out what is really important to you. I found that out, and am fortunate enough now to be able to do it.”
Truth has done performance work with The Black Valley in Grass Valley. He was a founding member and president of the board (2002-2006) of the Storefront Artist Project in Pittsfield, MA. He wrote and published three books, I Am A Dog, Revolution of Flowers, and Everything I Know About Death (Subject to Verification.)
Truth lives in Nevada City, CA, and is currently preparing for multiple tours of his theater piece An Intimate Evening With Death, Herself.
“The Dog Doesn’t Know Anything” acrylic on canvas, 18″ x 24″
Artist Statement
We living beings at some ease in our overly-constructed realities sometimes need a little shock to wake us up to the bigger reality we’re always in whether we realize it or not. I’m not an artist who sets out to shock anyone simply to do so; there are too many such artists at any given moment. Shock for its own sake is little more than annoying; just more noise and less signal.
My premise is that we living beings constrict our reality based on ancient habits and even more ancient genes; we make a seemingly safe little world which we inhabit as the central and crucial character. But the worlds of the non-living and the non-human continue to exist whether we pretend otherwise or not. What are our entry points into these other realms? I’m not sure but I go on the premise that they exist, and that I’m not―totally, at least―crazy. I’m talking about a living and evolving universe; it’s alive and evolving through and with us.
In my paintings, writings and performances, the harlequin, the clown, and other, more mysterious (to me, at least) characters show up to show us, in ways difficult to articulate in our normal linguistic fashion, in which directions we might be coming from, and which we might be going to. To encourage us to take a deeper look, not into the fashionable recreations of the other-worlds and under-worlds that can be found without looking very hard, but into what’s really going on around us in the corner grocery store, our kitchen, our place of work, the cities in which we somehow, miraculously, find ourselves living.
“A Dog Dreams” acrylic on canvas 36″ x 48″
