design archives
The painter of distinctive portraits and uncompromising images was a true original, but her personal life was turbulent and often self-destructive Words Catherine Coyle
Pat Douthwaite [1934-2002] painter
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like to remember Pat Douthwaite as a young woman full of mixed diffidence and hope, embarking on a voyage that was to come near to shipwreck many times,� wrote Douglas Hall, former director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in 2000. He had championed her work for a long time but she was, according to many of the gallery owners, art enthusiasts and contemporaries who knew her, intent on self-destruction. She seemed to deliberately steer her ship off course, never satisfied that she was heading in the right destination. It perhaps came as little surprise when news broke of her death from an overdose of prescription drugs in 2002. At that time, the 67-year-old was living alone in Dundee. She was still working, painting in a range of media and across a spectrum of themes, but her output was sporadic, as unpredictable as her mood v Homes & Interiors Scotland
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“Separating the personality from the painter is a difficult, counterintuitive process, but Douthwaite’s story is one of contradictions and self-destructive turns”
[Right] Pat Douthwaite: Worshipped Women, exhibition catalogue from the Scottish Gallery’s 1982 show [Below] An invitation to the 1967 exhibition at Richard Demarco’s gallery [Opposite] The artist with her dog, Henry Dooley. [Opposite, left to right] Woman Wearing a Hat, c.2001; Homage to Brian Jones, 2001; Gwen John Courting, 1983
and always with an underlying sense of dark melancholy. Douthwaite was born in Glasgow in 1934 to a middleclass family. Her introduction to expressive arts came at the age of thirteen when she started a class in movement, mime and dance under Margaret Morris, a proponent of the Isadora Duncan school. She showed a natural talent and won a scholarship, scuppering her parents’ plans to send her to boarding school. She also met Morris’s husband, the Scottish Colourist JD Fergusson, who recognised her aptitude for art and encouraged her to work on it. Douthwaite, who was entirely self-taught, took Fergus son’s advice and chose not to go to art school. Whether this decision gave way to her tense, black, wholly recognisable style is unclear, but she knew instinctively that art, not dance, was the path she was destined to follow. Her friends, her travels and her bipolar disorder all played a significant role in the formation of her artistic style but none of these should define this important, largely overlooked painter. Indeed, separating the personality from the painter is a difficult, counterintuitive process, but Douthwaite’s troubled story is one of contradictions and self-destructive turns. She moved to Essex where she lived in a commune with fellow Scots artists William Crozier, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. It was through these contemporaries that she met Paul Hogarth, a successful artist and illustrator whom she married in 1963. The couple had one child, Toby, and over the next ten years the family lived in 174
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Hogarth’s homes in Cambridge and Majorca. During her time in Majorca, she met the writer Robert Graves, who remained a friend throughout her life. Her family set-up was, sadly, short-lived, and her tendency to uproot and leave soon kicked in. Throughout the 1970s, Douthwaite was ruled by her restless soul, travelling extensively and living for periods in Edinburgh, Ayrshire and the Borders, as well as India, South America and Africa. While her drifter lifestyle allowed her to investigate new subject matter and consume new cultures, having no permanent base to return to meant she had none of the stability of other artists. The lack of a studio or even a space to store materials meant that the very nature of her work changed; at this point, seeking a more transportable medium, she was working largely in pastel on paper and began to dabble in watercolours. As her life became increasingly fraught and her closest relationships began to fracture, she became more and more isolated. A mugging left her in constant pain, and she seemed continually embroiled in drama. “I’m in my own play. I’m directing and acting it,” she once admitted. She had a long battle with a removal company that, she claimed, had damaged some of her works. In 1986, on a whim, she gave the entire contents of her studio to an auction house. The Scottish Gallery (her representatives) intervened, buying her collection to prevent career suicide. She also stole back a painting that she had sold, deciding after the transaction that the buyer was not worthy of v
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[Above] Italia Bird, 1994. [Right] Big Mother with Sacha, 1994. [Below] By 1970, when this picture was taken, Pat Douthwaite was 36 years old
her work. By all accounts, she was as charismatic, theatrical and entertaining as she was obtuse, acerbic and hypercritical. She had a reputation for falling out with people and there was a sense that hers was a career doomed. Her subject matter varied widely over the years but the same themes remained at the heart of her work. Women’s issues – motherhood and gender equality – feature throughout, but Douthwaite was essentially her own subject: whether that was in her self-portraits, the paintings of her husband or friends, elements of her own being would feature. She became fascinated with heroines and her show, Worshipped Women, was an alphabet of Greek deities. She also developed
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an interest in Mary Queen of Scots and the aviator Amy Johnson; but, as Guy Peploe of the Scottish Gallery noted, all the women she painted were dead – had they been living, she would have considered them rivals. She found some joy in her later drawings of animals, particularly of cats, but her fragile sensibilities are the thread that runs through her work. The Scottish Gallery had a relationship with Douthwaite for over 25 years. This summer, the first of a three-part exhibition opens, exploring this cult artist’s work on paper. r Modern Masters III: Pat Douthwaite, Works on Paper; July 2-28, The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, 0131 558 1200, www.scottish-gallery.co.uk