Doug Newton

Spring Onions, oil on canvas, food, realistic

2018

After attending Stanford University, Doug Newton studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Post school, he worked as an art director for a number of years in Los Angeles and New York. His early works were in a suburban surrealism mode. While painting the American landscape, houses and gardens, mostly from imagination, he also drew and painted extensively from the figure. He began painting still lives of food, toys, candy and household objects. The still life painting became his main interest. Mr. Newton has been in numerous group shows across the country as well as four one person shows. His paintings are in many private collections. He was also chosen to do a residency at Fundación Valpariaso in Andalusia Spain in 2012. _______________ ESSAY by Dr. Sonia Coman Doug Newton's hard candy: the confection of painting Doug Newton's paintings are about… painting. The hyperrealist technique of trompe l'oeil or “trick the eye” is knowingly playful. It simultaneously calls attention to the illusion of a different material—for example, translucent candy wrappers—and the reality of the layers of paint, masterfully applied to the canvas. In that, Newton's paintings pay homage to an esteemed series of trompe l'oeil masters, from Inquisition-era Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán to Gilded-Age American painter William Michael Harnett. But Newton adds something new to the genre. His paintings revel in the effortlessness of their illusionistic effect, celebrating the tension between the abstract quality of a brushstroke and the precise representational image it renders in the viewer's eye. The reflections we often see on Newton's canvases heighten this unapologetic presence of multiple materialities—real, perceived, and imagined. Unlike shadows that extend across surfaces, the reflections of Newton's depicted chocolates and ribbons sink into something resembling a mirror. This murky reflective surface is at odds with the angle and the opacity of the main surface, i.e. the painted canvas itself. The doubling of the depicted objects through these spectral, distorted reflections draws attention to the fact that painting, too, is a (subjective) reflection of some form of reality, be it everyday objects or less palpable things like the artist's inner world. Newton's choice of candy and ribbons as privileged subject matter conjures up memories of childhood and notions of play, pleasure, and comfort. However, enlarged and decontextualized, Newton's candy assumes a different, more serious dimension, inviting the viewer to turn the banal on its head. I find Newton's paintings of confections akin to group portraits. To me, they provide a meditation on the nature of painting. “Confectionery” comes from the Latin “confectio,” which means “something made by putting together.” That stands true of candy as it does of painting. The effect on the consumer of a good piece of candy, like that of a good painting, is the result of an elaborate, multi-layered process—one that we're invited to “unwrap” in our minds' eyes as we enter Doug Newton's realm of confection as painting. ~Dr. Sonia Coman (Art Historian, currently: Director of Digital Engagement, Washington National Cathedral)