950 Starlight Rd.
After breaking his hip, on January 3rd, 2021, my father was moved into a nursing home and my sister and I were tasked with emptying and selling his house and studio of 54 years.
Through the steady disassembling of his spirited brick home in the woods, I shot around 20 rolls of black-and-white film. My studies attempt to capture the beautiful, if dysfunctional, overstuffed house and his lingering presence in the rooms and among the still lives. These images are printed on silver gelatin darkroom photo paper last produced in 1999. The paper has greyed with age.
Stephen Douglas was a devoted artist, who had early success as a teenager, fresh from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, with stylized caricatures of Broadway actors and illustrations for theater magazines in the mid-1950’s. After travels to Europe and Puerto Rico, where he produced hundreds of realistic charcoal portraits, he studied traditional oil painting at the Art Students League. In 1963, after attending a lecture by the Indian guru Kirpal Singh, my father became a vegetarian, renounced material success, married my mother (a Holocaust survivor), began a family, and moved upstate to the country. He pursued a career as an art teacher, and continued to produce drawings and paintings–often with the thrilling combination of skill and risk. Aside from occasional commissions and exhibitions, and disconnected from modern technologies, he remained in the shadows of the larger art world.
My father died peacefully on June 26, 2023.
A sample of his artwork: Stephen Douglas
I intend to preserve and catalog his vast oeuvre and in time, put together a book, as well as a retrospective exhibition.