I don’t like to tell people why I create it. It’s better if they create their own story.
Doug Desmond’s pencil drawings, pen and inks, watercolors, etchings and oil paintings create stories for you to tell.
“I always have an idea in mind, a reason why I create a work,” says Doug, a Caspar resident, whose art is a fusion of Old and New World with a touch of J.R.R. Tolkien thrown in. “I don’t like to tell people why I created it. It’s better if they create their own story.”
Doug admits that there is something of him in everything he does. His own image often appears as a character in an event he’s drawn from family history or personal experience. In one drawing, he’s in the back of an old car racing into wide-open spaces, away from a citadel full of odd characters and chaos. “This is me escaping from the congestion and gated communities of the Bay Area,” he says.
The images he creates are intricate in their detail, rich with figures and characters, and full of possible meanings and interpretations. He’s like a silent film actor saying lines that only you can hear. You look at the whole picture, then as you draw closer you see hundreds of smaller pictures with odd angles and odd people that make you smile—a flight of fancy into a hidden realm. His work is just plain fun.
He once told an art college interviewer that he likes to picture things “vulnerable and lugubrious. I find a lot of subject matter that fits that criteria.” Occasionally he illustrates for a commission, but admits estimating hours is difficult (“I’m usually wrong”) and deadlines make him “grumpy.” Despite this aversion to deadlines, he has committed to prepare 60 pieces for a retrospective show planned for the Mendocino Art Center in May.
Doug’s first interest in art dates from age five when he told his mother he wanted to draw “just like the guy who draws Tarzan.” Encouragement from a grammar school teacher who gave him extra credit for illustrating book reports helped him visualize stories. Jobs working in a print shop and for a trade newspaper as a young man, combined with training at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland helped him develop his craft and drawing style. “Really,” he says, “I learned more from looking at art and hanging with artists then I did sitting in college lectures.”
Along the way, he married and raised two children and managed to make a good living. Neither his son nor daughter is a visual artist, but both play music. “We love to plunk on a guitar and sing Appalachian folk songs,” he says, noting that his daughter plays mandolin and his son is an “accomplished musician.”
Doug is an easy-going Irishman (his grandfather was born in Belfast) with a twinkle in his eyes, a calm demeanor and engaging smile—a man totally at ease with his work and his life. “I no longer need to work for money,” he says, “but I still work every day, sometimes for 30 minutes and sometimes for eight hours.”
A single work can take 40 hours or more. If he feels a case of artist’s block coming on, he doesn’t fight it: “I let myself get totally bored and fatigued to the point of depression. Since I hate to be bored and tired, I then get reenergized by taking an idea and creating a new work.”
Art is not an exact science. But Doug’s etchings are created through a multi-step scientific “intaglio” printing process that involves coating a piece of zinc or copper with a brown waxy “ground” material, cutting through the ground with a stylus, “biting” the exposed metal with nitric acid, removing the ground, inking the etched lines and pressing the image into wet paper. A slight variation in the final product causes him to reject it.
In the corner of his 15’ by 20’ studio is a bulletin board, covered by a collage of images and short phrases, that serves as a way station for his ideas. “Sayings and potential titles for future work will pop into my head or I’ll sketch a character’s face. I park them on the board until I have a work they will fit into,” he says, pointing to some favorite pieces in his idea collection. Taped to a narrow brick wall nearby are three small clay figures he molded and then later used in an elaborate pen and ink drawing.
A pair of water- color-on-clayboard images across the room features a man and woman singing. The inspiration for these and four others already sold came from a 1927 French film on Napoleon. “It was a silent film on video and I could hear them in my head singing the French national anthem,” Doug recalls. While watching the film, he paused his VCR every few seconds to capture the images for a sketch of the singers’ faces. From the sketches, he created a series of watercolors.
Doug rejects any suggestion that creating the incredibly fine details of his work is tedious. He calls the creation process “calming” – the sort of work that requires no drugs because it is “a drug in itself” and gives you a “natural rush.” There is satisfaction, he says, in creating something from nothing. “Bill Zacha (artist and Mendocino Art Center founder) once told me art is something from nothing and you sell it for money.” His work continues to sell well at the Prentice Gallery on Highway 1 in Fort Bragg, in the Artist Co-op of Mendocino on Main Street in Mendocino and at the Main Street Gallery in Dublin, California (the Bay Area), and he looks forward to his upcoming retrospective show at the Mendocino Art Center.
Although he reluctantly admits being nearly 70, he doesn’t usually like to link his work with his age because “artists should be judged for their art and not for extraneous factors such as age or disabilities.” He says he has no plans to retire – as long as he is having fun. Besides, he chides, “I’m just in my prime as an artist.”
Though he enjoys the recognition he has earned as an artist, he would prefer being known by the company he keeps – a merry band of artists who have dubbed themselves the “Usual Suspects.” Each year they commit “a small crime” by breaking away from their primary gallery commitments for a nine-day free-for-all show at Caspar’s tiny What’s Afoot Gallery. The “Usual Suspects” – Karen Bowers, Lynne Prentice, the late J.D. Mayhew, Hope Stevenson, Sunshine Taylor, Naida Schorg, Sev Ickes, Maralee Greene, the late Olaf Palm, Gayle Rushmore and Dale and Susan Moyer – are familiar to most locals. “Sometimes we’ll just pile in two cars and head out to some joint in the East County for a party,” Doug says. “We have a lot of fun.”
And fun is what his work is all about. “My work is nothing profound,” he offers humbly, smiling. “I get an idea and create something I love. I’m still a little kid at heart. This is just a plaything for me.”
This article, written by Bruce Lewis, appeared in the May 2005 issue of Mendocino Arts, a publications of the Mendocino Art Center. The Art Center featured Doug Desmond's Retrospective exhibit from May 8 to June 5, 2005 in the Main Gallery.
Doug Desmond was born in Austin, Texas in 1935 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He considers himself self-taught, although he did attend The California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland on a scholarship, the University of Texas, and later California State College at Hayward. He has participated in many group, juried, and one-man shows, and is included in many collections throughout the United States and Europe. He is a member of the Artist Co-op of Mendocino.
For the last fifteen years Doug has worked mainly in graphic illustration. His media include pen and ink, oil, watercolor, etching and sculpture.
In 1989 Doug moved from the Bay Area to the Mendocino Coast and now lives with his wife Marilyn in the little hamlet of Caspar, which is about four miles north of the village of Mendocino, about 120 miles north of San Francisco.