Doug Blanchard's Art
About Doug Blanchard
“I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.”
--Orson Welles
Well my paintbox is a lot cheaper. Why not take advantage of it?
Figurative art was invented for story telling. Form is bound up with the telling of a story through imagery. Telling a whole story in a single image is no small task. Go ask Giotto or Brueghel just how easy it is. I try to tell stories in my pictures and I'm not sorry about it. We live in stories. Our lives have beginnings, middles, and ends. The world described by our senses is the world in which we live out our stories, and is the world for which we are responsible. The other worlds are uninhabitable.
I try to make sense out of the world, just like everyone else. I face whatever gets thrown in my direction and try to understand it. I try to give my art all the coherence, order, clarity, and wonder that real life frequently lacks.
I paint figuratively and always have. The magic of seeing three dimensional experience conjured upon a two dimensional surface will never get old for me. The human image, human experience, and the human point of view are the primary focus of my work. How we make images of people says a lot about how we think of humanity; as the Center of the Cosmos, as a bipedal animal, as a statistical unit, as an employee, a consumer, a commodity, a medical history, a social case study, an annoyance, a bag of flesh, a sex object, a lover, a relative, a friend, an enemy, a soul, a tax ID number, a potential convert, a voter, a subject, a citizen, a loner, a thinker, a misfit, a saint, a hero, a failure, a criminal.
I want my work to be communicative in terms of our experience of the world and the life we live in it. I look to ancient Classical art, to the artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, to all the rest of art history, to photography, to comics, and to movies to guide me.
“But what, after all, was humanism if not a love of humankind, and by token also of political activity, rebellion against all that tended to defile or degrade our conception of humanity? He had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form. But he who cherished beauty of form did so because it enhanced human dignity.”
--Thomas Mann from The Magic Mountain
Who Am I and Where Did I Come From?
I was born and raised in Texas. I live in Brooklyn and I keep a studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I teach art at Bronx Community College.
My CV:
Education:
The New York Academy of Art; Graduate School of Figurative Art;
MFA cum laude 1993
Washington University, St. Louis, MO.
ABD status in art history, 1988
MA in art history, 1986
Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO.
BFA in painting, 1981
Selected Exhibitions
2009 Figureworks Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, New York Academy of Art Second Biennial Alumni Association Exhibition
2007 JHS Gallery, Taos, New Mexico, “Who Do You Say I Am?” Visions of Christ, Gender, & Justice, an exhibition to mark the publication of Kitt Cherry’s Art That Dares with a chapter featuring my series of painting on the Passion of Christ.
2005 Office of the Manhattan Borough President, New York Method Bemcomes Practice; Artists Involved in AAI¹s Studio Program
2004 Leslie-Lohman Foundation, New York The Passion of Christ; a series by Doug Banchard
2001 Organization of Independent Artists: Gallery 402, New York Shadows (David Wojnarowicz) Paintings by F. Douglas Blanchard
2001 Pleiades Gallery, New York, 19th Annual Juried Exhibition, Lisa Dennison, chief currator of the Guggenheim Museum, juror
2001 Nexus Gallery, New York, Celebrity. My work was favorably reviewed in Gallery & Studio, March/ April issue, 2001
1999 Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center, New York, “It Was Beautiful!”Marty Robinson, Tom Doerr, & Stonewall; Paintings by F. Douglas Blanchard
1999 Limner Gallery, New York, Emerging Artists
1998 New York Academy of Art, New York, Beyond Appropriation; Dialogues with Tradition, Phillip Pearlstein, juror.
1998 Leslie Lohman Foundation, New York, Universal Diversity 6
1997 Vis-a Vis Gallery, New York, Marty Robinson and Tom Doerr Remembered
1995 Gallery 84, New York, National Juried Exhibition, Audrey Flack, juror
1995 Gallery on 2nd, New York, New Works
1990 Berea College, Berea, KY, Faculty Show
1999- 2007 studio assistant for Christina Vergano, New York
2002- 2003 artist for Evolving Image Studios, New York
1994-1996 studio assistant, Anne Harris Studios, New York
1993-1995 artist, Evergreen Studios, New York
Teaching Experience
2001- present art instructor, Bronx Community College, CUNY, Bronx, NY
2006- 2008, art history instructor, Nassau Community College
2006- present, lecturer, NYU, New York, OLLI program
1999-2004 art & art history instructor, Suffolk County Community College, Brentwood, NY
1996 art history instructor, SCCC East, Riverhead, N
Y
1996 art history instructor, Dowling College, Oakdale, NY
1988 & 1991 lecturer and art history instructor, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
1989-1990 art history instructor, slide librarian, Berea College, Berea, KY
Curatorial Experience
1998 Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, New York,
Photographs of Richard Wandel
1996 LGCSC, New York, The Photographs of Leonard Fink,
reviewed by Guy Trebay, The Village Voice October 1996
1989-1990 director of the college galleries, sabbatical replacement, Berea College
Berea, KY
1986 curatorial intern, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
Scholarships
1991-1993 partial tuition scholarship, New York Academy of Art
1984-1986 Etta D. Steinberg Fellowship, Washington University
1984-1988 full tuition scholarship, Washington University