Douglas Maguire_Artist Page
Douglas James Maguire
The Blue Heron Hotel, 2007, Oil on Canvas, 46’’ x 68’’, $46,000
Something that has never been said about the compositions of Douglas James Maguire, an intractable American landscape painter from the unyielding Catskills, who is well versed in the Hudson and Luminist traditions, is that he takes intrepid risks. His introspective oil paintings rumble as though anticipating a distant earthquake (while listening to jazz royalty). On canvas and linen he paints feelings inspired by place, and has been known to return to the same mercurial outcroppings. The locations he has sought are not easily scuffled or subsequently abandoned.
Scaling rocks and mountains, he has painted forsaken fields, forests, reservoirs, lakes, coastlines and cliffs plunging into the sea, from the Northeast to Ireland, Greece, Morocco, Mexico and Puerto Rico, abstracting realism to the point of prehistoric proportion. Maguire’s scope encompasses a vast trajectory of line, rhythm, space: more as rattled earthscape than defenseless topography, and from the perspective of a raptor in the ionosphere. Light is the leading character. His nocturnes are unquestionably awake and watchful.
Maguire’s paintings reach across boundaries with a sense of dreamtime aviation held in abeyance. Perhaps this is due to his years spent as a traveling US Naval Aerographer, or swimming in his under-watercolor-explorations of the Aegean. Elemental, ancient alignments creep into the undercarriage of his stonewalls and timberlines, while his atmospheric faculty of sight, summit and pigment float, disperse and stretch the needle on the compass. With terrain rooted in the millennial wild, mirroring a surgeon, Maguire deconstructs the clamoring Tower of Babel.
- Alethea Maguire-Cruz (Daughter)