by Bruce Lewis

“I don’t like to tell people why I create it. It’s better if they create their own story.” - Doug Desmond

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.

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.”

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.”

by Bruce Lewis, from the May 2005 issue of Mendocino Arts, a publications of the Mendocino Art Center. The Art Center featured a retrospective exhibit of Doug Desmond’s art from May 8 to June 5, 2005 in the Main Gallery.