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 engineer and surveyor during the pipeline years in Alaska, a chef, truck driver, building dismantler, English teacher, and as a software salesman in Taiwan. During most of the 1990s 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 to hundreds of companies around the country, including Borders Books, CoffeeWorks, and Federal Espresso.

Houses, especially older ones, have always inspired a deep fascination. "I used to find abandoned farm houses in the fields and woods where I grew up in Indiana, and it was as if I could feel the lives of the families who had lived there. As if the house itself remembered them. It was eerie." Reluctant to say much about his work, Truth will add that, "I try to put the viewer into the painting."

After a serious illness in 1998 Truth closed his other businesses in order to devote himself entirely to painting and writing. "After a bout like that," 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 lives in Nevada City, CA, and is working on more books and his performance piece, Death As A Salesman.

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Artistically speaking, he has spent much of his life as a writer and short-order cook, based on the mistaken impression that he was
color blind.
When this misapprehension was corrected, Truth began a rampage through paper, pastels, acrylic and canvas, discovering that, indeed,
"He never met a color he didn't like."