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Artful Mind - July 2004

Douglass Truth
"I never met a color I didn't like."
By Karl Saliter
Photographs by Julie McCarthy

I'm sitting in that funky coffeehouse in Great Barrington, right next to Berkshire Community College's South County campus, a block from the co-op. The coffee is perfect. The staff is composed of gorgeous twenty-somethings; there are comfy couches in the back room. I can speak for the pastrami and warm Brie sandwich, and recommend the chocolate chip cookies, but don't even ask me the name of the place. W-something. I came here, as you've surmised, looking for the Truth. I'm early.

I sit at the base of "View From The Stairs," a Doug Truth painting from his earlier years. I am continually drawn into it, and it takes me in unexpected directions. When you look at one of this guy's paintings, you can love it, you can hate it, but it's hard to pass it by. Doug's works fly off the canvas at you, or yank you into their alternate world, where impossible perspectives shift under your feet, and where anything can, but likely already has, happened.

He comes in, and I start in the cerebral basement. He's stretching the Truth, by calling himself that. No, it's not his given name. Doug Truth, neé Cracraft, was in Seattle in the 1980s when he wrote his first article. As it was on Buddhism and sexuality, (don't you want to read it?) he wanted a parent-proof pen name and, daydreaming, looked across the street, where sat the Douglass-Truth Library, named after Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, and the new name was born. The pen name evolved into a parody of an institution called The Douglass-Truth Institute, inspiring a mail-order business featuring wish-fulfillment postcards, zines, and strange pamphlets for a while, and eventually transmogrifying into the painter of today. Painter of what?

I asked Doug what he's up to, with his brush. "A friend, Antero Alli, once said, 'Space is intelligence.' To me, everything in a given space is teeming with life force, even if it's a chair. I'm trying to explore that." His paintings contain an enormous amount of energy, and they command psychic attention. I like them.

If you go to his studio, located in a downtown building in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (and you should), you'll see the teeming. The paintings have taken over the place, and while you're sorting out which 75 to look at, he's apologizing that so much of his current work is currently out in various shows. The "Dark Café" series is some of his best work. Stay away from number 7; I've got my eye on it.

His vivid palette is what often strikes a viewer first, and then they are led into the dimensions within of his paintings. For awhile, he went by the slogan, "I never met a color I didn't like," and in fact has organized whole shows on color themes, such as "The Discover of Pink," or "The Orange Towel Series."

His work is mindful. "I've been interested in meditation for years. Back in California, my artist friends were very into it. They had a reductionist viewpoint." He recommends a book by the cool name of The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size, and says it's a good transfer of eastern thought into western culture via the findings of a Danish scientist. I decide to buy it, so that, like so many expanding pieces of literature in my life, it can sit on my shelf, serving to make me appear clued-up.

I want to know what he has abandoned on his journey: what he once knew about painting, and unlearned. "The only thing I knew about painting was that I just hated it. I went to a class at an arts store. I avoided art after that. I was more into motorcycles and wrestling when I was in high school. Then I forgot that." A fortunate forgetting, as Doug is currently on to something with his painting work. It's difficult to articulate, but the guy's love for what he does is clear, as is his commitment. I hope the motorcycles and wrestling make it onto the canvas soon.

The validity of the exploration comes through in the work. Doug's pieces confront you with, if nothing else, an enormous amount of presence. They are of this moment. I ask him what his process is like. "I sketch on a black background, with a partial idea in mind. Interesting details seem to get pushed in. Details that wouldn't necessarily be there come in. They just get pushed in."

I ask him to elaborate on this, and he tells me that while he's working, ideas come, and want to be introduced. A painting of a chair, say, and unbidden will come the thought, "I wonder what it would be like if you could also see into this window over here", and he's off in a new direction. He said it really feels like they (the ideas) want to get in there on the canvas.

He came to painting relatively late in life. A wanderer, he had worked as a civil engineer and surveyor during the pipeline years in Alaska, a chef, short-order cook, 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 silkscreen company, Flying Turtle Graphics, supplying his own unique and strange designs on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and posters to hundreds of companies around the country, including Borders Books, Coffee Works, and Federal Espresso.

His effervescent writing and off-kilter sense of humor compliments his singular artwork. His biography begins thusly: "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."

Doug started painting in 1995, when a painter friend threw a New Years Eve party and set up black gesso canvasses for guests to paint on. "I had been a graphic artist for years, and then discovered that night that I loved the moving, fluid feel of the act of painting, and the tactile nature of it. I let my business go completely, it was a T-shirt business at the time, and just started painting. I had a premonition that I was going to die, and so gave it my all. Oddly, that spring, I almost did die."

Doug's dance with death is an interesting tale that really carved his position as a painter for him. It's astounding to hear what a long deep fall it was, for the Doug of today is an articulate, perfectly expressive creature. He had a tumor, which led to a life-threatening brain abscess that took weeks for the doctors to even diagnose. It was in his all-important speech center.

"They thought all the verbal skills were gone. All words spoken to me sounded garbled. When I came back to consciousness in the hospital, there was a newspaper there. Trying to read it, I thought it was from Czechoslovakia. I had speech therapy for a summer. She would ask me to name three movies, and I would gradually break into a sweat. So I figured, I don't need this: I let the business go, and just painted. I was just glad to be alive. The first paintings after the illness were the hardest, bleakest time for me as a painter. I was afraid that whatever had happened to me would affect the painting. I was really tired from the illness, so the first few, I honestly thought I had lost something."

During the interview, Doug referred to this episode in his life as a formative time, with an interesting perspective on the journey of becoming a painter: "I had some help," he said, referring to the intervention of friends who assisted in known and unknown ways. Everything is context.

His journey continues. "I never had any training, and I keep trying to get better technically. I just want to paint all the time, but I'm also working on a book, a parody of a memoir called 'Why I paint'. Its really hard for me to just write straight text. I'm looking to do more performance, more paintings."

His dream canvas? "Well, if it's a big canvas, I can put a lot of stuff into it. A lot of my work is (not explicitly) about death. The more we can be with the fact that death is always with us, the more we can be alive. I would want this painting to reflect me at my most alive. My backyard comes to mind. My backyard as a movie epic." Hope he paints it.

Doug chooses subjects from intuitive observation. "Sometimes a particular perspective will catch my eye. I like the movement from one space to another. Sometimes, I'll take photos. I don't paint from them, but sometimes I'll snap one as a reminder of its energy. Some of my favorite paintings are on the darker side, but not negative. I don't start out a painting with a particular desire that they feel like anything."

Houses, especially older ones, have always inspired a deep fascination, and many of his works feature interiors or exteriors, including a series of mobile homes that are in homage to a trailer home park he once lived in near Davis, California. "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."

I ask him about the artist community he works within. "The Storefront Artist Project was why I chose to move to Pittsfield. I was on my way to North Adams when a friend told me to call Maggie Mailer, so I did. Pittsfield gave me open arms instead of 'Who needs another artist.' They gave me free studio space, embracing me because I was an artist. I love this community, and think I'm lucky to have found it. Next I'd like to see if there are artists who are interested in meditation and stuff like that."

"The experience of working with and in a group of somewhat-like-minded practitioners is something that too few artists today enjoy. In working with others you get lots of feedback, friendship, and pretty good insurance that you won't take yourself too seriously."

The public has responded in a big way to his work. He said the first painting he ever sold was to a woman who said it was the first painting she had ever bought. He is represented by galleries in California, Arizona, New York, Massachusetts, and now Connecticut.

Doug was recently signed on by Kelly Wirth at The Outsiders Gallery in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut. It was the first time that anyone has put his work was in the tradition of 'outsider' art, a label that makes sense given the fact that he is self-taught and bold in expression. I asked Kelly for her impressions of Doug's work. "A friend showed me a copy of Doug's artist book, I am a Dog, featuring his paintings and text, and I knew I had to have him in a show in the gallery. It was so raw, so original, and expressed a zany sense of humor. I called him that day and had him bring some of his work over the next day. I looked at his paintings and offered him a show right away; we named it "The Dogs of August and Some Turtles." Douglas will be painting new pieces for the show and will give a reading from his I am a Dog book at the opening."

Looking into "View From a Staircase" together, we have plenty to pull us in. "There are several alternate universes I seem to be painting from. I don't do much with figures, but once in a while, I can trick myself into doing it by painting a picture of a person."

A pause, as Doug sits and hits on the most interesting facet of creating art: the real creator's juice. When he articulates it, I know his work will continue to pull people in. He looks at the alternate worlds he paints in bright colors and hyper-optioned directions, and says, "I'm curious about who lives there. What goes on there."

Paintings by Douglass Truth can be seen at Woggaffer's Coffeehouse at 345 Main Street and Bella Collections at 154 Main Street in Great Barrington, and at Bellissimo Dolce café at 444 North Street in Pittsfield, MA. A solo show of his work will be on display at Papyri Books at 49 Main Street in North Adams, Massachusetts through the months of July and August. The show opens Friday, July 2, with a reading by Truth. He is also a participant in Pittsfield's Sheeptacular project, featuring 70 artist-decorated life-sized sheep on the sidewalks of downtown Pittsfield.