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signed and dated lower left
EXHIBITED:
Pat Douthwaite Retrospective, The Scottish Gallery at Art London, 2001; Pat Douthwaite – Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2005, cat. 16
ILLUSTRATED:
Guy Peploe, Pat Douthwaite, Samson and Co., 2016, plate 65
The female figure is a self-portrait accompanied by a dark, spiritual figure, who seems more like a companion than a grim reaper. Both figures are relaxed, as if observed in a waiting room suffused with a dirty yellow light with a comically bent palm tree lending an exotic presence. Death references occur throughout the artist’s oeuvre but are seldom sinister, more often in the form of animated skeletal players in a pageant of life and death, in which both must be present but the living unafraid.
Pat Douthwaite was born in Glasgow in 1934. She studied mime and modern dance with Margaret Morris, whose husband, J. D. Fergusson, encouraged her to paint. This important influence apart, she was self-taught. In 1958 Pat lived in Suffolk with a group of painters, including the Scots Colquhoun and MacBryde, and William Crozier. From 1959-1988 she travelled widely, to N. Africa, India, Peru, Venezuela, Europe, U.S.A., Kashmir, Nepal, Pakistan, Ecuador and from 1969 lived part of the time in Majorca, and more recently in various properties across the Scottish Borders. She died in July 2002 in Broughty Ferry.
Douthwaite seems to find it necessary, like a method actress, to inhabit the idea, to get inside the skin of the role, as it were. Her paintings, often grotesque for all their elegance, can range in mood from tragicomic frenzy to angst-ridden melancholy, but they usually have a certain exciting theatricality in common. Cordelia Oliver, 1981
Gallery Director Guy Peploe knew the artist well and is the recognised expert on her work. He published a monograph on the artist in 2016.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1977, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000 (Retrospective), 2005 (Memorial), 2011 (Retrospective – Paintings & Works on Paper), 2014, 2016, 2020 (London), 2021
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