Chennai based artist C. Douglas’ work, by which one also means his life, since the two cannot be separated, is a constant process of negotiation.

These include several identities- as an artist from another state living in Chennai; as an artist from within Chennai who lives in the Cholamandal Artists’ Village and as an artist who is an integral part of the Madras Art Movement but creates works that cannot be easily fitted within the nativist ideology of the   movement. While such identity dilemmas confront most artists, Douglas is not only conscious of it but this awareness also informs his art. As a result, he sees himself as an insider/outsider in various contexts, with the sense of being the latter predominating.  

Douglas’ works contains repetitions of images but in his case these repetitions could be seen as retracing of paths already trodden in order to find the map. But Douglas understands that the journey is the meaning. For him it is the act of trying to map that gives him meaning. More literally, maps are composed of lines and it is through lines or drawing that Douglas finds his own place within the context of the Madras Art Movement. And in the way the drawings connect to deeply personal yet universal themes of loss, longing, waiting and selfhood, he finds his place within the larger world.

C. Douglas’ works in this exhibition capture his journey from the 1990s until the last few years. The works from the 1990s mark the time when he had begun working on his characteristic grey works, influenced by German Expressionists. To him, this neutral colour represented a liminal state that embraced vulnerability over heroism and uncertainty over finality. Crumpled and coated with sand and grey pigment, these paintings have an inherent ‘slowness’ as the images, of lighthouses, fetal forms and nebulous figures, slowly emerge into view due to the way they catch light. Unhurried and muffled, his paintings have the quality of an echo where there is both a presence and an absence.

The notion that identity is not constant but evolves/is meant to evolve with time is also reflected in his artistic identity that has been metamorphosing with time. From his dark works of the 1990’s and early 2000s, in 2008 he moved to a series of works that embraced flat surfaces and colours. This Missed Call series (2008) engages with the idea of presence and absence using the ‘missed call’ as a metaphor. Fragmentation, absence and emptiness are conveyed in these paintings through a non-hierarchical arrangement of disjointed mannequins, broken ladders and phones with receivers off the hook, plastic flowers, toy birds etc. Through these missed call-like representations, where there could be a presence 'within' an absence, he creates a sense of expectation among the viewers. As Douglas writes, the series 'is so much about waiting and simulation. We miss what is original, what is real: the presence'. 

Metamorphosis and transformation are constant concerns in these works as C. Douglas makes repetitive use of images of butterflies, cocoons and caterpillars. The open-ended nature of the meaning making process is evident even in the dynamics between the poet and his art; the butterflies although originating from the poet, once created, no longer remain only in his sand crusted and tactile world as they glow in shades of ultramarine and red ochre. 

C. Douglas

Born in Kerala in the year 1951, C. Douglas is one of the most collected artists of the Madras Art Movement. He retains the essence of Kerala in the form of theories and words read during his boyhood and the story of an early encounter with existential literature. He attended Balan Nair’s school for a year. During the period, he met K Damodaran in Tellicherry. Consequently, he took admission in the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Madras (1971). He was in the ceramic section and he concentrated on terracotta and ceramic vases. He had a special place for K Ramanujam, whom he called an anti-hero during his years in college. He began spending his weekends at Cholamandal, hence he was in touch with Ramanujam. Ramanujam’s death in 1973, his shift from the Cholamandal Artist’s village to Germany where he was caught between the art and the real world, brought about a change in his outlook of his role as an artist and his responsibilities as a member of the family. Germany taught him the importance of painters like Paniker and Ramanujam through their lens. He was exposed to the world of Abstract Surrealism through several exhibition visits. He turned to figurative Abstractions in 1985 to 1995 and his works speak volumes on modernist poetry. He worked with paper, cloth, sand tea stain, and he would often walk on the paper, and crumple it in order to create a surface of his own. There is an assumption that the man with bandages on his head in the Douglas’ series, Missed Call (2008) is in actuality a self-portrait of the suffering he had endured. Douglas is a voracious reader of contemporary philosophy and poetry, and he believes the future of art lies in dialogue and reading.

The artist lives and works in Chennai.