DOUGLAS PAUL SMITH

Opening May 29

Douglas Paul Smith was born and raised in Canton, Ohio, where he started drawing and painting as a youth, and began a healthy obsession with Richard Scary's book, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. After studying product design, animation, and printmaking in college, his nomadic personality and cultural interests lead him to many areas of the globe. He sketched people in small mexican towns, indian train stations, and eastern european cafés. He later taught himself oil painting and developed his own brand of political folk art, something akin to Grandma Moses. Shortly thereafter, Douglas studied under a world-renowned illustrator in Seattle and became an editorial illustrator for Seattle's A&E weekly, The Stranger, in 1997. Continuing his appetite for sporadic world traveling, his work began to focus on the travel itself. Around 2002 he returned to his love of Richard Scary, and, deeply influenced by the styles of Milton Avery, Cy Twombly, japanese calligraphy, and the tibetan meditation/dharma art teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, began creating his signature folk renderings of cars, airplanes, and people portraits.

Since 1992, Douglas has exhibited in galleries, museums, and on the sides of buildings in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville (Kentucky) and in France. He has co-directed and acted in political and Dada-like performance art groups in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Tucson, Arizona. He currently enjoys making work for motion pictures, and his favorite patrons are Hollywood executives and film prop houses in Los Angeles.

Douglas now lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he studies meditation and art, Japanese calligraphy, paints, designs aerogrammes (intgirl.com), plays the banjo and guitar, and drums for the Shaktipat guerrilla Marching Band. He is currently exhibiting his Mexican wrestler prints in a touring museum exhibition in France.