Patdouthwaite | On The Edge | February 2021 | The Scottish Gallery

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ON THE EDGE

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ON THE EDGE

4 - 27 February 2021

16 Dundas Street, EDINBURGH, EH3 6HZ TEL: 0131 558 1200 EMAIL: mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Cover: Pat Douthwaite, c. 1977 Left: The Fête, c.1965, oil on board, 120 x 120 cm (cat. 7) (detail)

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On The Edge Scotland is rightly celebrated for its artists, past and present and in explanation, certain positive traditions are evoked; well taught drawing, respect for materials and strong use of colour. Happily there have also been many artists also who sit entirely outside any tradition.

In the last fifty years one can consider James Cowie, Joan Eardley, Pat Douthwaite as the best examples.

Douthwaite’s unflinching commitment to her vocation, her unique stylistic means and her ability to interpret the visual world through the prism of her imagination mark her out and make her contribution unique.

She was born in Paisley into a conservative, middleclass family, growing up with the privations of postWar Scotland and from a very young age aware of feeling different and alien. She found her freedom and vocation in dance and art classes with Margaret Morris (1891-1980) and John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1960) in Glasgow and never looked back. She wrote a piece called “Margaret Morris Remembered” for the Scottish Art Review in the late seventies: If you talk about dead people they might come after you - I feel that particularly about Margaret Morris. You might say “how childish,” but she has such power while alive that I think she might be watching.

Several years ago I was driving through thick fog between Stirling and St Andrews University to yet another private view, with Douglas Hall, with his nose pressed to the windscreen, said “Do you think any of that Margaret Morris horror rubbed off on you?” (It is fair to say that Hall had only known Morris in old age.)

Horror? What horror? I thought back through the years to my childhood, and the first horror – smacks across the face for being left-handed.

Little me, the one who lived out fantasies, wore gauze curtains, wheeled upturned kittens in an old pram in the long garden, a garland of flowers in my hair. Now trapped in school, a zombie whose feet didn’t touch the floor, my desk remained unopened, my fantasies locked. That “horror” opened the door of the magic palace,

the pale blue palace stuck on a corner of Blytheswood Square and West George Street, with the tall straight person who wore long pointed blue-green shoes and acres of green dress. My eyes went from the feet to the scarlet, scissored lips, which opened and shut and then I reached the eyes – brown monkey eyes, which met mine with a magpie intensity. That moment I knew she was going to be of tremendous importance to me. I was seven. It is hard to call her a woman because she had gone beyond gender and become as a queen, but taller – more important. Yes, she had got me very young, wounded, sensitive. But she could set me free.

When she was sent to boarding school, being “groomed for Highers and Lowers to become a Doctor” once again she was rescued by Morris when she responded to a notice in The Herald for auditions for a small touring dance company to be called the Celtic Ballet. She performed a Paul Éluard poem and dance improvisations and was awarded the Phyllis Calvert prize and two years to work with Morris. The culmination was a series of summer performances for Ted Shawn, in Massachusetts at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 1954. Douthwaite was by now something of a firebrand. She was involved in the SNP, the girlfriend of one of the Stone of Destiny robbers and makes the unlikely claim to have put bombs in letterboxes on Sauchiehall Street. It was JD Fergusson’s insistence that she be taken to America. The artist recalled: As I was the smallest I was last in line to do the Six Greek Positions. Margaret beat the drum and I performed one beat behind the rest. The house was in hysterics and Margaret almost tore her hair out. Afterwards I was summoned to her dressing room. She had on nothing except her wig and was munching a bunch of grapes – she just glared at me and then the brown monkey eyes switched to magpie and I said, “It’s just what you would have done”. She laughed and gave me some grapes.

On return to Glasgow the company was dissolved and Douthwaite determined to become an artist. It was

Life in Suffolk on the edge of poverty supported by only £2 a week she and others experimented with amphetamine, Preludin- later banned. Thus she and others would continue to live on nothing but supplies of this drug – all cycling to Halstead Boots to bring it.

Pat Douthwaite, Celtic Ballet, 1954 (3rd from the left)

Fergusson who dissuaded her from going to Art School and for this she was eternally grateful; she already felt an artist and had one of the essential ingredients in abundance: self-belief.

After she left Glasgow her life was always unrooted, moving around the country and latterly the world. In the late fifties she was in Essex and Suffolk alongside artists Robert Colquhoun (1914-1962) and Robert MacBryde (1913-1966) as well as William Crozier (1930-2011).

She got much instruction from Colquhoun, which she acknowledged saying she also learned what little she knew about cooking from MacBryde! There is certainly something about the totemic single figure composition, which Douthwaite might have taken from the older painter. At Michael Rothenstein’s graphic workshop at Great Bardfield she would have met more senior English figures such as Edward Bawden (1903-1989) and John Aldridge (1905-1983) as well as Michael Ayrton (19211975), whose artistic obsessions chime more closely with Douthwaite perhaps than any other British artist. She also met the artist and illustrator Paul Hogarth (19172002) and they were married in 1960 having one son, Toby. It was amongst what Cordelia Oliver called this “warren of individuals” that she began to paint in earnest. In biographical notes she produced for her last show at The Scottish Gallery in June 2000 she recalled in the third person:

From the early sixties she and Hogarth spent much time in Deià in Majorca becoming part of the circle around Robert Graves for whom she became a favourite, often dancing for him. Hogarth produced a collaborative book with Graves in 1965: Majorca Observed and divided his life between Majorca and London where he was senior tutor in the department of graphic art at the Royal College of Art. In these early years, and by her own account, life was precarious, poor and idealistic with no resources. Her first exhibition was at the 57 Gallery in Edinburgh in 1958, an artist cooperative space that had started the previous year in a first-floor studio on George Street that gave first exhibitions to many of Scotland’s most significant post-War figures.

Little survives from this period but what does speaks of a rigorous, modernist approach; dense, collaged works demonstrating knowledge of current European movements such as tachism and some work clearly in debt to Dubuffet.

The catalogue chronologies sum up the years 1959-1999 with a list of travel destinations and indeed she was constantly on the move. She had an insatiable appetite for new visual experience but went much further than mere looking; she immersed herself in the esoterica, animals, ancient religions, folklore and intellectual life of a new place. By 1964, when she gave a short interview to the Scottish Art Review and claimed to be living in London, she was working in enamel paint chiefly on board and had arrived at the human figure as her principal subject. A succession of dandies, friends and grotesques were her models and there was humour as well as acid in her observations. The writer of the interview avowed a Pop Art influence, denied

by Douthwaite who mischievously chose lines from a Robert Lowell poem as a theme for the paintings she was working on:

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My hopped up Husband leaves his home disputes And hits the street to cruise for prostitutes If her approach is not mainstream Pop there are certainly links with Peter Blake and David Hockney if only in a common stylishness and emphasis on the twodimensional which is essentially of the sixties.

By the end of the decade her subject was enriched by travel but also refined emotionally and intellectually towards particular themes. Writing in 1988 for the introduction of the Third Eye Gallery Retrospective in Glasgow Cordelia Oliver summed up Douthwaite’s maturing as a subject painter: Female – not feminine – to the core, baring teeth and claws in defence of her offspring (and by that I mean her often highly maligned paintings and drawings) she has made herself almost her sole subject, painting not as she appears in the mirror but, as it were, from the inside out, from painful firsthand knowledge of her physical and psychological makeup, of her essential needs, frustrations rages and occasional ecstasies. From her work at its best emanates the essence of raw femaleness with all that implies of vulnerability, unacceptable drives and emotional demands.

On Douthwaite’s stage the female appears in many guises, as victim and predator, and she understands better than most that the impressive outsize persona can hide a shrinking core of anxious, insecure humanity.

She developed a growing mastery of technique, moving away from enamel to oil paint, which she applied with rags thereby abandoning any impasto, often working on the floor in an exhausting process. Her drawing became as important as painting. She used sketchbooks when travelling working chiefly in pastel and in the studio she drew constantly – when short of good paper on anything to hand. By the beginning of the seventies

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her work was as personal, distinctive and recognisable as any great painter. W. Gordon Smith agreed when reviewing a show of Recent Work at The Scottish Gallery in March 1993: The show is dominated by a group of halfa-dozen recent large oils, seductive portrait compositions which can be as mischievous as Beardsley and as doomed as Bosch. A disturbing juxtaposition of decoration and damnation by an artist so singular that I could identify it on a crowded wall from fifty feet.

The first significant show to address one subject was for Richard Demarco in 1967 with Mary Queen of Scots.

Then came two themes again for Demarco in 1972: The Manson Trial and American Woman Bandits. In the Manson paintings the “horror of the content and elegance of form are inseparably blended” (Cordelia Oliver) and as in so much of her painting we can at once feel discomfort or even repulsion at the imagery but be seduced by the beautifully realised form and colour.

The notion that the two are incompatible is new to the history of art and predicated on concerns about interior decoration and domestic consumption, which infuriated and exercised Douthwaite throughout her life.

Creating art is an entirely solitary process and Douthwaite’s aggressive self-advocacy often proved her undoing; she alienated so many potential allies by making assumptions about their attitudes to her own work or even their motives for taking an interest! This said, she did not seek a particular place in the art world establishment and indeed was comfortable about being allied to “outsider” art. Douglas Hall, the first Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and one of Douthwaite’s most influential and long-suffering friends, wrote the preface to the Third Eye Exhibition referred to how the ‘art world’ had:

...developed at its centre a new sort of code or language, instantly recognisable to those in the know and extremely mystifying to others. It is a language to which an ironic understanding of other art, avoidance of sentiment and avoidance of the obvious, are necessary... For the taste of the art world is above all cool, detached and sardonic... This is not necessarily bad, but it makes no sense in relation to an artist such as Douthwaite. When it comes to the point the art world is no more able to admit exceptions than were the academies of the past.

Writing twelve years later for The Scottish Gallery Retrospective in 2000 he added: ...supposing such a paradox as a ‘sane’ art world, Douthwaite could have no place in it. For her sanity is close to senility. At a period when artists even of the avant-garde were planning their careers like any other ambitious professionals always mindful of their image and place in the pecking order, Douthwaite was self-destructing, as well as suffering some crushing misfortunes.

But, not for the only time, he declared his belief that Douthwaite would one day be seen to belong to the mainstream of modern art. He believed that she was perhaps the only equivalent in her own time of the peintres maudits of the early 20th century, the artists of disorderly lives whose felt expression of the human condition contributed so much to the development of modern art.

Douthwaite’s chronology is difficult to follow; she moved base constantly, less often gravitating back to family properties as her relationship with Paul Hogarth became increasingly difficult. In 1974 she spent most of the year in Hamburg sponsored by a collector called Alex Ball. She became friends with the influential writer and Director of the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, Werner Schmalenbach. Through his introduction she exhibited in the LEVY Galerie. On her return to Scotland, she exhibited her work in a show titled New German Drawings at the Scottish Arts Council Gallery in Edinburgh. The following year much of her energy went into the design of a performance: Innana, staged at the experimental Traverse Theatre during The Festival.

Cordelia Oliver recalled the event: Inanna, based on another legendary female, a Sumerian goddess of that name, brought together huge screened blowups of Douthwaite paintings with actual figures in movement wearing costumes based on those same paintings. But in spite of its success with audiences, its creator refused to see the event as a concept truly fulfilled.

Pat Douthwaite Exhibition, Third Eye Centre 1988 (Pat in foreground)

Her intention was to control the entire performance as Kantor does, using people of her own choice who wanted to work with her. But Inanna was brought into being with the help of grants from the Scottish Arts Council and Gulbenkian Foundation and such unconventional freedom of conception was no doubt unacceptable at that time.

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Yet Inanna is an important landmark in her work; an extension of her painting into three dimensions and with a time element added – mordant, as I remember and decidedly disquieting. But she was right; the conventional choreography bore little relation to the quality of the imagination which populated the space with a spectacular blend of exotic costumes, sound and light as the ancient Sumerian legend unfolded.

Her personal dissatisfaction with the production turned her away from experimental theatre and design and what many believe could have been an important complimentary area of creativity. Her next exhibition, at The Scottish Gallery in 1977, however, was perhaps her most ‘theatrical’. Amy Johnston is a typical Douthwaite heroine: fearless and indomitable but in her chosen quest utterly alone; a victim also of hubris and nemesis close to the Icarus myth. The narrative of the story is depicted from a close-up of the frail heroine under her aviatrix goggles to the final fall of her Gypsy Moth to its destruction: a broken line descending over the brown void of an earthy grave. The artist wrote a preface to the short catalogue: As a painter one can only express oneself through the message in one’s pictures and all one can do is give reasons for a particular theme. My earlier paintings were mostly shrouded in darkness, steeped in an almost destructive violence and all of the female figure.

Now in a new frame of mind I have expanded the range of emotional experience and introduced an object to further the interplay of forms and therefore free the figure from its claustrophobic ambience; also through heightening my awareness I wished to imbue the object with its own personality.

Why Amy Johnston? To me painting is an unknown adventure and dreaming my greatest source of enjoyment so I can take part in situations, down to the tiniest detail, which I have never experienced.

After thinking and dreaming about the woman and object I started my research on Amy Johnston

In 1980 the Talbot Rice Gallery, at Edinburgh University, put on a drawing retrospective which subsequently toured to Dundee, Stirling, Orkney, Hull and Leeds. It was around this time she had a relatively settled period living in York succoured and encouraged by her friends Dr. and Mrs McLeod. In 1982 there was another show of new drawings for the Edinburgh Festival: Worshipped Women, this time with an introduction by Robert Graves, again with Andrew Brown at The 369 Gallery. In the same year The Royal College of Art mounted a full retrospective with a limited tour ending at York University.

Pat Douthwaite, Painting and dancing, c.1958

and out of all the woman I could have chosen Amy is my emotional double.

She has my deepest respect; my only sadness is that she cannot see this homage I pay her On the eve of the exhibition Douthwaite suffered a personal disaster. She had been staying at a friend’s flat on the High Street in Edinburgh and became the victim of a brutal punishment beating as the result of being mistaken for a previous tenant. The back injuries she sustained resulted in the need for pain control for the rest of her life.

However she did not let this misfortune reshape the pattern of her life. In 1979 she showed her ‘biomorphic’ drawings at the new 369 Gallery, run by recent Edinburgh College graduates and for the next decade one of the most significant exhibitors of new painting in Scotland. The same work was exhibited at the Zenith Gallery in Washington DC.

And she was still travelling. A trip to France in 1983 led to a beautiful series of paintings inspired by Gwen John; haunting and melancholy but also sharp; she included a self-portrait in a ‘Gwen John’ hat for exhibition as well as I could kill Rodin, a hilarious, historically revisionist revenge painting. The next year she was in India and Nepal and from the abundant drawings we see her again more in sympathy with the deities and animals rather than the flawed humanity eking out a dangerous life in a hostile world.

Cauterising blades are blunted. Screams of protest are muffled – as are blows to the solar plexus or below. The most persistent element of her vision is basic and visible in the childlike image of Woman with Red Hair. But behind superficial resemblances to schoolchild art room products, Douthwaite delves psychologically with early infantile imagery – defined by Herbert Read as “haptic” – where familiarly significant organs/ items are emphasised by exaggerations of scale or colour while complex structures such as hands are rigorously simplified; a mode exemplified here in portrait of Myself with Malthy – an untidy white cat sitting at her feet. The figure in profile show off a swan-like neck and sensuous mouth engaged with a cheroot. On the large canvas, oil paint is mysteriously applied to render a softly tactile surface reminiscent of those produced by Francis Bacon.

She travelled again the next year, this time to Peru as if seeking ever more exotic information in her quest for inspiration. Ancient, pre-Inca burial sites and museum visits led to a few majestic ‘still life’ works of large pot-bellied Nazca vessels and one huge painting of the Andes represented as the great paps of an ancient earth goddess. And yet as Cordelia Oliver observed of the artist’s concerns in South America: “equally Douthwaite could see the humour in the birth of a kitten, only half into the world and already squeaking its vexation.”

The poignancy and humour she saw in animals became an increasingly important subject; the absurd profile of a waddling puffin; the shambling innocence of her longlimbed spotty dog Henry Dooley; her black cat Lemons McGuire stalking moths. These were altogether gentler images than the Dying Zebra of 1977. She showed new work with the William Jackson Gallery in 1991 and again with The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh in 1993.

Here the influential Scotsman critic Edward Gage who detected a change in the work reviewed her exhibition:

Pat Douthwaite, by George Oliver, 1987

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Qualities of caricature previously grim and Baconian are now more light-hearted and enmeshed in decorative passages – spattered dots, serried stripes, floating petals, droopy earrings, to make one think of Aubrey Beardsley.

Conversely her Expressionist power and psychological insight enables her in a series of Hebridean portraits to distil the stoical essence of the Gaelic head. Broadly drawn, a big imaginative canvas celebrating the witch Isobel Goudie might have been taken from the residual soot of her burning, while the ivory sheen of her skin produces empathetic shivers.

But for Douthwaite death was the only certainty in us all and she seemed to hold its presage in respect but not in fear. After a visit to her mother, by now in a home in Paisley, she painted Los Viejos Comida la Sopa, two skeletons enjoying soup, a work frankly allied with Goya, another artist deeply engaged with mortality. A few years before she had attacked her mother at home and had ended herself in a police cell and then hospital; the pain of childhood could clearly move her to destructive passions. After her mother had finally died she made the affectionate Ma and her pal in Heaven – Balkan Sobrani, Best Hats, little Glass of Sherry. Her titles could sometimes be more of a caption and integral to a layered reading of the work. But while demons pursued her to the end she could still draw on a deep well of something near optimism: she would finally resolve her divorce settlement, triumphant one day that Paul Hogarth had, she thought, remarried bigamously! And always searching for the perfect studio, cottage; for a home. A god-forsaken spot on a moor in Ayrshire was exchanged for Berwick. Before the move and at a low ebb she consigned her studio contents to Phillips the auctioneers, the auction eventually being cancelled in favour of The Scottish Gallery buying much of the work from the artist.

Her peripatetic life had necessitated endlessly changing storage arrangements for her earlier work and an unresolved dispute with Pickfords over damaged works on paper had precipitated her decision.

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From Berwick she sent a characteristic homemade Christmas card in 1994 to The Gallery “Love it here in my Victorian cottage near the wild sea and foreboding sky – you must come out – working hard on the show!”

The show in October 1995: Works on Paper 19931995 was a great succès d’estime, and accompanied by a catalogue including another insightful introduction

by Douglas Hall. From the mid-nineties she allows an affectionate nostalgia to come into her work; memories of a girl in Majorca who decided she was Russian and called herself Vavarra, the solidity of a chest of drawers in her room in York, a delinquent boy with a puppy down his shirt. She also began to find the exigencies of oil painting near impossible and was using a new medium: watercolour, with which she achieved a velvety, rich texture especially when she had good Arches paper as a support.

She showed again in February 1998 but works on a small scale, charmingly summed up by Gallery Director Iain Barnet: Birds mourn, Maguire hunts moths, a flower jumps over a Bluebottle, Snakes have Wheels, the Zoom Bird flies, the Beekeepers meet, a Queen crosses the road, Puss waits for the limo, a striped Bird, logically (?) lays a Striped Egg while the Red Cat stalks and Moths really do have ten legs.

These watercolour drawings, many with Letrasetted titles and inscriptions, she was able to send to the Gallery in Jiffy bags; they are some of the most amusing, touching and light-hearted works in her oeuvre. She had been living in Ayr, the charms of Berwick like everywhere else proving short-lived, but had sold up again and shortly after the February show she was living in hotel accommodation first in Kelso and then back in Berwick.

Her next destination was the South West of Scotland, to a house on the edge of the market town of Moffat.

Isolation is the necessary condition for the artist but is not the best circumstance for good mental health.

Harsh physical conditions also took their toll and she had to be opportunistic to ‘get her messages.’ Whenever the fine art carriers Aardvark called they were sent back into the town for cigarettes or a prescription! It was to escape Moffat that she went on a retreat to the Buddhist Monastery at Samye Ling in October 1999; if she had been looking for spiritual enlightenment this was undermined by her own detachment – the artistanthropologist with an advanced sense of irony and the absurd – and the impish company of Charles Scott, a friend and private dealer, with whom she regularly absconded to the local pub. She moved again to nearer Dumfries and seemed to have built up a good support network but any length of settled contentment was an illusion. Her last significant group of work to be exhibited was with the Retrospective mounted by The Scottish Gallery in June 2000. Despite a broken foot she was able to attend, picked up and delivered by a friend, her last opportunity to hold court; it was clear to all who saw her then that she was far from well.

She had set her heart on a property in Perthshire and in the summer of 2002, after a spell in hospital, she seemed in buoyant mood, encouraged by contact with her old friend Clara Young at Dundee Museums. She was staying in a hotel in Broughty Ferry and tragically it was there, alone, that she died on July 26 2002.

Despite the lack of a permanent base and studio she exhibited regularly from 1991 through The Scottish Gallery, a relationship of maturity, which mostly she valued highly. This culminated with a retrospective in June 2000. As the art market expanded many more people discovered Douthwaite; her life force, technical accomplishment and uncompromising subject matter.

Sometimes life enhancing and often dark: a visceral, tortured release of her id. All her work however was made with a stylishness and passion that marks her out as one of the great individual voices in post-War British art.

Guy Peploe

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Pat Douthwaite continues to intrigue and divide. She has fierce adherents who respond in a personal way to the challenging themes and imagery in her work. There are also sophisticated, established figures in the art world who instinctively reject her as an outsider, even after her passing. The extraordinary range of her subject matter from myth, to real life crime, to fashion, to fantasy, animal, erotic, quixotic, always surprising, is unified by her own highly personal aesthetic which challenges the audience to love or hate.

She has always defied any attempt at taxonomy from the critics, dealers and curators who have tried to make sense of her work; for Douthwaite in life any whiff of a career path would be immediately destroyed by a volte-face: you fools, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Guy Peploe, 2021

1950s Pat Douthwaite, London, c.1958, Photograph by Angus McBean

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Man Smiling, 1959 monotype, 50 x 40 cm signed lower right Exhibited Pat Douthwaite Retrospective, The Scottish Gallery at Art London, 2001; Pat Douthwaite - Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2005, ex.cat.; Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 1 Illustrated Guy Peploe, Pat Douthwaite, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 50

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2 Man with Bared Teeth, c.1959 monotype, 40.5 x 50.5 cm Exhibited Modern Masters Women, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2020, cat. 28 Man with Bared Teeth belongs to a group made in Suffolk in the winter of 1959, some were exhibited with The Redfern Gallery in February 1960. The influence of Dubuffet is evident both in the primitive human representation and the combination of pattern and gesture in the paint application.

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3 Suffolk Landscape, Winter, 1959/60 oil on board, 118.5 x 178.5 cm signed and dated lower right, signed and inscribed with title on fragmented label verso Exhibited Pat Douthwaite - Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2005, cat. 3; Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, 2016, cat.

2 Illustrated Guy Peploe, Pat Douthwaite, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 4

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Douthwaite is a painter with an exceptional gift of externalising her own fantasy world, filling and quickening a two dimensional space with nervously vital lines and emotionally expressive colour. Whether her subjects are legendary women – and these, like Theda Bara, Belle Starr, Amy Johnson, have been recurrent obsessions – or a shivering, cowering dog, or a palm tree sorely out of its element in an alien, northern winter, Douthwaite seems to find it necessary, like a method actress, to inhabit the idea, to get inside the skin of the role, as it were. Her paintings, often grotesque for all their elegance, can range in mood from tragicomic frenzy to angst-ridden melancholy, but they usually have a certain exciting theatricality in common.

Cordelia Oliver, 1981

1960s Patricia Douthwaite, 1964, Scottish Art News, January 1964

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4 Village Taxi, 1960 - 64 oil on board, 90 x 120 cm signed and dated lower right, inscribed with artist’s name verso Exhibited Modern Masters Women, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2020, cat. 27

In the harsh East Anglian Winter of 1959/60, Douthwaite was often on her own, pregnant and living in considerable privation, her lover Paul Hogarth working in Cambridge or London. By her own account the large boards on which she worked with poster paint would be deployed to block the inadequate windows of her cottage at night. The village taxi would be the means to get to the shop, or pub, a conveyance reduced in her painting to two wheels, patterned and graffitied bodywork and a driver resembling a gravestone. But the chill of the winter night and the sense of isolation are palpable while her sense of humour is, as often, to the fore.

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5 Collage, c.1961 mixed media and collage, 75 x 95 cm Exhibited Pat Douthwaite: An Uncompromising Vision, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2012; Modern Masters Women, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2020, cat. 26 The few collaged works of this year are successful works and indicate how Douthwaite was interested in texture and abstract design. The painstaking assembly of painted, canvas strips is deliberately crude, a denial of the craft which had so often underpinned much female artistic production: quilting, needlepoint and so on. It was anathema for Douthwaite to be pigeonholed as a woman artist despite the overwhelming thematic concentration on the distaff which would proceed. At this moment of intense experimentation, she sought a language and vocabulary to take forward and while she would return to an element of collage, it is the painted human figure which would soon dominate and inform her practice.

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6 Collage, c.1965 mixed media and collage, 120.5 x 105.5 cm unsigned Exhibited Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 7

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7 The Fête, c.1965 oil on board, 120 x 120 cm An individual work, like The Fête is as cogent and relevant today as when it was made in the mid-sixties. Douthwaite loved the movies and the two men in conversation chime with Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, the artist’s recollection of a conversation observed, no doubt, at a Suffolk village fête, privilege and violence ingrained in county society, unchanged for hundreds of years. It is this individualism in her work which now speaks so loud and finds her a new audience, each work stands alone, beautifully designed, enigmatic to a fault, undatable, present and challenging.

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8 Woman with a Peacock in her Hair, 1967 oil on board, 100.5 x 137 cm

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9 Yellow Nude (Woman One), 1968 oil on canvas, 121 x 121 cm signed upper right Illustrated Guy Peploe, Pat Douthwaite, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 54

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10 Woman with Green Hair, 1968 oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm signed upper left

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11 Bernard Berenson at Leptis Magna, 1968 oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm signed upper left

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12 Woman with Rose, 1969 oil pastel and charcoal on paper, 58.5 x 41 cm signed lower right

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Pat Douthwaite’s drawings have an edgy, idiosyncratic quality. During a life beset with personal difficulties, she created paintings and drawings that are charged with great power and tremendous wit. During her lifetime Pat Douthwaite (1934-2002) often identified herself with the fringes of the art world, not least because her emotionally intense paintings and uncompromising vision set her apart from the establishment. A glamorous, maverick character, Douthwaite had a reputation for being ‘difficult’, both in character and in her non-commercial approach to her work. Painting was a passion - usually undertaken at night while listening to experimental jazz music at full volume – and her ambivalence about parting with work was so extreme that she once staged a midnight theft to retrieve one of her own paintings having changed her mind about selling it to an unsuspecting buyer.

Simon Martin, Pat Douthwaite: The Uncompromising Image, 2012

1970s Pat Douthwaite, c.1977

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13 Woman with a Reptile, c.1970 oil on canvas, 125 x 100 cm signed upper left Exhibited Modern Masters Women, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2020, cat. 30 Douthwaite’s most significant subject throughout her life was the female figure, clothed or naked, real (in the sense of a real woman) or grotesquely imagined. Her heroines: Amy Johnstone, Mary Queen of Scots, an alphabet of Goddesses, American Bandits, are at once self-portraits and celebrations of female power. The woman is often accompanied by a creature – a sort of Pullmanian daemon or in Wicker, her familiar. In Woman with Reptile the grinning central figure poses like a showgirl stripped of her glamour while the patterned reptile, an ancient atavistic symbol, suspended inside down, adds to the queasy atmosphere along with the dirty background colour, like dingy stage lighting.

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14 The Funeral, c.1972 oil on board, 99.5 x 100 cm signed upper left

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15 Yellow Hair, 1973 oil on canvas, 140 x 142.5 cm signed lower left, signed and dated verso Exhibited Pat Douthwaite - Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2005, cat. 12; Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, 2016, cat. 16 Illustrated Guy Peploe, Pat Douthwaite, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 57 Like all her portrayals of women this work is a self-portrait, whatever the ostensive subject. It is Douthwaite’s pain or ecstasy that is exposed as she inhabits her subject, sometimes an historic recreation like Mary Queen of Scots or Amy Johnstone, sometime just woman, as here. Douthwaite worked on the floor, using rags to rub her oil paints into the canvas, achieving great tonal subtlety. The background colour is near uniform but not neutral: she creates the psychological keynote in her choices: black, red or green, against which her heroines have a heightened, theatrical presence.

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16 Dancing Nude, 1973 oil on canvas, 120 x 90 cm

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17 Goddess, 1974 oil pastel and charcoal on buff paper, 64.5 x 46 cm signed upper right

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18 Demeter, 1975 pastel, 62.5 x 47.5 cm signed and dated upper right Exhibited Pat Douthwaite: Worshipped Women, 369 Gallery, Edinburgh, 1982; Pat Douthwaite Retrospective, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2000; Pat Douthwaite, The Scottish Gallery at Art London, 2001; Pat Douthwaite: An Uncompromising Vision, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2012-2013; Pat Douthwaite: An Uncompromising Vision, Part 1: Works on Paper, The Scottish Galley, 2014, cat. 5; Modern Masters Women, The Scottish Gallery, 2020, cat. 31 Demeter was exhibited in her 1982 Festival exhibition Worshipped Women, which ran in alphabetical order. “D is for Demeter, the Goddess of Fury. When she went to look for her daughter, Persephone, she did not want any of the other Gods to take her so she changed into a horse. Poseidon was not deceived and turned himself into a stallion. From that union Arion the wild horse was born. My drawing of her is a big sexy woman with a horse’s head kneeling with one hand raised as if to say ‘O.K., you win, you had me and it was not so bad being a horse.’”

Pat Douthwaite

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19 Worm Woman, 1975 oil on canvas, 123.5 x 100 cm

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20 Jason in Flight, 1976 (Amy Johnson Series) oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm signed and dated upper right Exhibited Amy Johnson Aviator, Pat Douthwaite, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1977, cat.

10; Paintings and Drawings 1951-1988, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow and Peacock Printmakers, Aberdeen, 1988; Pat Douthwaite Retrospective, The Scottish Gallery at Art London, 2001; Pat Douthwaite - Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, 2005, cat. 14; Pat Douthwaite - Paintings and Works on Paper, The Scottish Gallery, 2011; Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, 2016, cat. 17 Illustrated Douglas Hall and Cordelia Oliver, Douthwaite - Paintings and Drawings 1951 - 1988, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1988, p10; Guy Peploe, Pat Douthwaite, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 59 On the fifth of May 1930, Amy Johnson set out in her de Havilland Gypsy Moth G-AAAH which she called Jason on her epic solo flight to Australia. The painting depicts the aircraft in flight against the dun coloured, featureless landscape which might be the artist’s idea of the Australian Outback. The plane’s number is writ large in the sky, like a cry of danger or sheer joy, the essence of the spirit of adventure which Douthwaite equated directly with her own actions as a painter.

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21 Lord Wakefield, 1977 charcoal, 75 x 55 cm signed and dated upper right, titled lower left Exhibited Pat Douthwaite: An Uncompromising Vision, Part 1: Works on Paper, The Scottish Galley, Edinburgh, 2014, cat. 7; Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, 2016, cat. 18 Illustrated Guy Peploe, Pat Douthwaite, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 60 The only possible link we can find between Douthwaite and Lord Wakefield is historical.

The Castrol Oil Company, founded by Lord Wakefield (1859-1941) helped to fund Amy Johnson’s solo flying career which culminated with her journey to Australia in 1930 and Douthwaite, fascinated by all aspects of her life as she prepared her Amy Johnson exhibition in 1977, must have made an image of the industrialist patron.

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“Suggestion – one poem each per week. Starting today.

I prefer no more STRAIN I prefer reading underground poems I prefer the country to town I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of conformity I prefer to draw and paint and dream Winners think like winners Never give up no matter what to live in the eternal present together with Dooley two pea hens and a peacock A geriatric citroen and a house with no furniture I prefer my garden scattered with flowers That is what I prefer.”

Extract from letter from Pat to her friend Mrs Valerie Macleod, York. (c. 1986, Norfolk)

1980s, 1990s Pat Douthwaite, 1984

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22 Bentley (Vintage Car), 1977 charcoal and pastel, 54 x 75 cm signed and dated upper right Exhibited Modern Masters Women, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2020, cat. 32 Douthwaite made a trip to India in 1976 from which experience many drawings emerged in the following years, including this wonderful, eccentric Bentley (although the badge seems more like the Rolls Royce Spirit of Ecstasy taking flight). As when she draws people or animals, conventional perspective is subverted in favour of character and we are invited to speculate about the history of this British vehicle on the other side of the world.

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Letter to Henry Dooley, c.1988

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Mr Henry Dooley, 1982 oil on canvas, 100 x 123 cm signed and dated lower left Exhibited Pat Douthwaite - Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Galley, Edinburgh, 2005, cat. 19; Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, 2016, cat. 21 Illustrated Guy Peploe, Pat Douthwaite, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 67

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Pat and Dooley, c. 1988

24 Spotted Dog (Henry Dooley), c.1983 pastel, 67 x 54 cm unsigned

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25 Madeleine, 1983 oil on canvas, 143.5 x 95.5 cm signed upper left

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26 An Indian Man I, 1985 pastel, 57.5 x 78.5 cm signed and dated upper right Exhibited Pat Douthwaite Retrospective, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, June 2000; Pat Douthwaite, The Scottish Gallery at Art London, June 2001; Pat Douthwaite - Paintings and Works on Paper, The Scottish Gallery, 2011; Pat Douthwaite: An Uncompromising Vision, Part 1: Works on Paper, The Scottish Gallery, July 2014, cat. 13; Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, 2016, cat. 24 “From 1959-1988 Pat Douthwaite travelled widely to North Africa, India, Peru, Venezuela, Europe, U.S.A., Kashmir, Nepal, Pakistan, Ecuador and from 1969 to 1974 she lived part of the time in Majorca with her husband Paul Hogarth. This drawing was presumably created following one of her trips to the Indian subcontinent. In 1986 Douthwaite had an exhibition at the Saddler Gallery, Durham City with the quirky title, ‘Yippee! I went to India.’”

Simon Martin, 2014

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27 Barra Man, 1987 charcoal, 64 x 49 cm signed, dated and titled upper right Douthwaite visited Skye and Barra and drew seagulls, puffins and people, the latter invested with huge character. Douthwaite was a prolific draughtswoman, favouring a large sheet. Her drawings are usually of a single, arresting subject made with charcoal and coloured chalks, using white and coloured paper. The starting point for a painting or drawing by Douthwaite is always particular: an historical figure, a character, an observed incident or self-portrait. Her charcoal drawings share much with her Glasgow contemporary Jack Knox, in their quick execution, economy of line and direct engagement with their subject.

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28 Cat with Kitten on Back, 1988 charcoal and pastel, 76 x 51 cm signed upper left “Pat Douthwaite’s son Toby Hogarth has recalled that his mother: ‘adored animals above all, preferred them to humans any day. I suppose because they gave her undivided affection no matter what. She collected butterflies and beetles and always had a soft spot in her heart for animals of any kind. She became closer to them as life went on, I think because she’d had bad experiences with people.’”

Simon Martin, Director, Pallant House Gallery

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29 Dog with Rings on Legs, 1988 charcoal and pastel, 72 x 47 cm signed upper left

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30 Woman in a Dress, 1990 chalk and charcoal on paper, 51 x 63 cm signed and dated upper right

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31 Orcadian Landscape, 1999 watercolour, 61 x 46 cm signed and dated lower right Exhibited Pat Douthwaite The Outsider, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 34 The artist made several watercolours of a striated Orkney, land and sky, some with birds, all deeply evocative of place and true to the moment.

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Solo Exhibitions

Public Collections Include

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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition Pat Douthwaite: On The Edge 3 - 27 February 2021 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/patdouthwaite Designed by The Scottish Gallery based on 2016 publication designed by Kenneth W Gray Photographed by John McKenzie Printed by J Thomson Colour Printers All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photography or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers

16 Dundas Street, EDINBURGH, EH3 6HZ TEL: 0131 558 1200 EMAIL: mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Right: Goddess, oil pastel and charcoal on buff paper, 46 x 64.5 cm (cat. 17) (detail)

PAT DOUTHWAITE Guy Peploe The first monograph of Pat Douthwaite, published by Sansom and Co. June 2016 Price: £20 softback