I’ve admired Doug’s work for years, and I own one of his prints. Doug told me that he has a degree in printmaking but now does both painting and printmaking. He taught art at the high school level, and then at Defiance College, before retiring from teaching and moving to Dayton.
Doug’s paintings somehow turn seemingly simple drawings of everyday things into interesting art. “My inspiration comes from working with figures in different variations,” said Doug. “I raised chickens for many years, and they appeared in many of my paintings. I grew up near Grand Lake St. Marys so fish and water scenes are often in my work. I’m fascinated by the shapes, the contrasts and dissonance of things. I have a sort of modernistic, geometric style.”
When I visited Doug he was working on a few paintings in different stages, so I got some understanding for his overall process. He worked on one piece where the outlines of two fish were already drawn on the canvas in pencil. I watched him apply modeling paste over his sketch and then smooth it out with a piece of wood. Then he used a pencil to cut through the modeling paste in several places. “When I stain this piece” he explained “the stain will be darker along those lines.”
I also watched Doug work on two pieces that had already been stained and then painted. As he put the finishing touches on these pieces, he added dark lines that somehow made the painting seem more like a print.
To see if you like his work as much as I do, you can look at one of Doug Fiely’s engravings in the Dayton Kyoto print exchange now at Sinclair’s Triangle Gallery and you can see some of his paintings tonight at 6 PM. Mikee Michelle Huber Huber is opening her new studio at 903 N Keowee and Doug is one of the guests artists who will have work on display.
