Doug Braithwaite | Fine Art

Artist Statement

I enjoy the outdoors—plein-air painting is a lot about surviving the elements. Feeling the heat or cold, the bugs, the wind, all somehow become translated into the paintings. I also work in the studio, but all my work is based on time I have spent outside.

Keeping my work fresh, I have found, is a challenge. I often worry that it will be hard to continue to be a landscape painter in a place where you have lived and worked all your life. But I have found that what used to seem to be a limited resource is, in fact, quite limitless. The more I paint, the more options for paintings are opened up. While I am constantly looking for new motifs to paint, I have also noticed that working from the same places over and over again has infinite possibilities--in that the light changes throughout the day, as well as throughout the year, and offers endless subtle changes in mood and personality.

I find myself reexamining many things that I have worked already or passed by in times past and finding that there is something there that I didn’t see or maybe was not capable of expressing before. I find it very interesting to try to understand what it is about a place that causes me to stop and paint. For the most part, I stop because I like what I am looking at, or there is a certain color that jumps out at me. I also believe that there is a certain geometry and or rhythm that may be some of the underlying influences.

As I strive to move forward in my work I am trying to understand and express these things. I am constantly looking for the balance between the abstract quality of a satisfying paint stroke verses the accumulation of paint strokes that add up the visual expression and hopefully then to some kind of an emotional experience for who ever stops to look.

Education

Formal: University of Utah; 1986-1991
Bachelors of Fine Art with painting and drawing emphasis

Studied Under: Paul Davis, Dave Dornan, Tony Smith, Doug Snow, Ed Maryon
Painting, drawing, figure, monoprints

Juried Awards & Shows

1st Place, Ogden Plein Air Competition 2007
Honorable Mention, Springville Museum 2007 Spring Salon
Plein Air New Mexico 2005 – Received Merit Award
$5,000 Purchase Award, Deseret News, Color of the Land Competition July 2005
1st Place Eccles Center Black & White Competition, January 2004
Mayor’s Purchase Award, Art & Soup, Salt Lake City, Utah, April 2004
1st Place Plein Air Painting Competition Vernal Ut June 2004
1st Place Purchase Award - Everett Ruess Plein Air Painting Competition, Escalante Ut. Oct 2004
3rd Place, Helper Plein Air Painting Competition, 2003
Honorable Mention in the Deseret News “Color of the Land” Competition, 2002 and 2003.
1st Place, Helper Plein Air Painting Competition 2002
Honorable Mention, Plein Air Painting Competition 2001
3rd Place in 1996 and Honorable Mention in 1997 at the Springville Museum of Art Spring Salon

Shows & Exhibitions

Eccles Center – One Person Exhibition (June 2007)
Torrey Gallery – One Person Exhibition (June 2006)
Terzian Gallery – One Person Exhibition (February 2006)
Gallery at the Station, Ogden, UT (October 2005)
Rogoway Gallery, Tubac, AZ (February 2005)
Coda Gallery in Park City (2001 & 2004)
Wilkerson’s Art Center in Huntsville, UT (2002)
Phillips Gallery (2000)
Torrey Gallery (1999)
Boise State University (1996)

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