DOUG BLANCHARD

BIOGRAPHY

I was born and raised in Texas.  For many years, I lived in the Midwest.  I’ve lived in New York City since 1991.  I’ve painted since I was 10 years old.  I have graduate degrees in painting and in art history.  I live in Brooklyn and I keep a studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I teach art at Bronx Community College/ CUNY.  Over the years, I’ve been involved in both gay rights causes and organized labor.

STATEMENT

Figurative art was invented for story telling. Form is bound up with the telling of a story through imagery. Telling a whole story in a single image is no small task.  We live in narratives, and we remember and retell in narratives. Our lives have beginnings, middles, and ends that are like stories. The world described by our senses is the world in which we live out our stories, and is the world for which we are responsible. Other worlds are, in the end, not ours to inhabit. I have a certain ability to make pictures out of whatever pops into my head. Sometimes those thoughts are political, sometimes philosophical, sometimes religious, and sometimes sexual. Always, my intentions are poetic, to make whatever I’m fixated upon to be memorable and resonant.

I try to make sense out of the world, just like everyone else does. I try to give my art all the coherence, order, clarity, and wonder that real life frequently lacks.I paint figuratively and always have. I will never tire of the magic of seeing three-dimensional experience conjured upon a flat surface. The human image, human experience, and the human point of view are the primary focus of my work. How we make images of people says a lot about how we think of humanity.

I want my work to speak in terms of our experience of the world and the life we live in it. I look to ancient Classical art, to the artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, to all the rest of art history, to photography, to comics, to movies, and many other sources to guide me.

“But what, after all, was humanism if not a love of humankind, and by token also of political activity, rebellion against all that tended to defile or degrade our conception of humanity? He had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form. But he who cherished beauty of form did so because it enhanced human dignity.”                                                                   

--Thomas Mann from The Magic Mountain

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