MARK DOUGLASS: THE POETRY OF MOLTEN SAND
Paint, pencil, paper, canvas, clay, camera. Mark Douglass could have, and at times has, used all of these media. But, like a moth to flame, Douglass is entranced by the red-hot process of moulding molten glass to match his dreams.Glass is the most demanding of materials. When hot it oozes with a life of its own that must be tamed. As it cools it is at its most vulnerable, as delicate as a child fresh from the warmth of the womb. But once it has emerged whole it is timeless, elegance captured in the flames and stablised; a perfect moment of organic shape patterned with that artists hand, gestures captured mid-stroke, a frozen second of expression.
Mark Douglass has been entranced with this medium for just on 20 years. He graduated with honours from Monash University Glass in 1986 and has since forged a reputation for combining his anarchistic painting style with the cool, carefully measured technique of forging liquid sand. At times they are timelessly elegant, at others they border of the surreal and the bizarre. Going beyond the simply decorative, they are ambitious artistic statement in and of themselves.
Having worked on many large scale commissions over the years, Douglass signature style is on display in some of Australias leading corporate collections including BHP, Cadbury Schweppes and BP. Douglass has also shown successfully both in his native Australia and internationally, and his work can be found in the collections of many private collectors.
Douglass signature vases combine an innate sense of colour and scale, with surface treatments in graaul, or otherwise hand-etched and sandblasted for additional depth. Themes and imagery are built from up palette of symbols and abstract shapes including botanic, figurative and architectural motifs that are open to interpretation in numerous ways, allowing the imagination of the viewer to find entranceways to a shimmering world of colour.
The larger than life fluted vases with stems offer a hyper-real take on what is a common article of interior embellishment The three-dimensional nature of his work allowing each piece a multi-faceted character.
A painting is static, but somehow, despite their sense of permanence, their static presence, DouglassŐ works in glass continue to move, to pulse with the rhythms of music, of nature and of the artists hand.