HAPPENINGS “Siren”
Giclee on Canvas 20” x 16”
Photo Credit: Andrew Groves
Bob Doucette, an artist who grew up by the sea in his home state of Maine, heads back to the waves April 15-17 at his EC Gallery Seaport Village show “Undertow: I Hear Te Sirens Song.”
Doucette’s work and theme will aim to show anyone viewing his art that he indeed still feels the Atlantic tide of his home. Jellyfish, water plants, Krakens, and leviathans are promised to be seen in the seaport waters, but another influence and a familiar signature to his work will be there too—girls whose eyes you get lost in. Sirens to be exact, known from Greek mythology where they would lure sailors to their watery death using song. As ghastly as a scene like this is, it is pure beauty when you look at
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any of Doucette’s doe-eyed women. “For me, when I start painting, I am very
much a face person,” he said. “So when I do something that is a face I have to communicate with it on a very basic level. I need an emotional response to it. I have to paint the face first and if the eyes don’t speak to me, don’t have some kind of emotion to me, it goes dead to me.” When Doucette is not painting creatures only Jacques Cousteau has lived to see, he is an artistic polymath, if there ever was one.
From the time that he was a knee-high kid taking lessons from his father, he believed himself to be an artist. When adults around his hometown would ask him if he always wished to be an artist when he grew up, Bob would always look up from his scratch paper to declare, “I am an artist!” When he was not reading Charles Addams comics and watching Chuck Jones cartoons, Doucette went on to achieve an impressive list of roles: lead animator, storyboard artist, and sculptor. While all
OFF THE EASEL MAGAZINE – SPRING 2016
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