Pat Douthwaite: On The Edge

By Susan Mansfield, 26.02.2021

Pat Douthwaite, The Funeral, oil on board, 99.38 x 100cms. Ⓒ The Estate of Pat Douthwaite. Courtesy the Scottish Gallery.

Pat Douthwaite’s work doesn’t fit easily into any strand of 20th century Scottish art. One suspects she would prefer it that way. She certainly chose the margins over the mainstream, geographically and professionally, keeping her distance both from the art world and from those who sought to help her. Her work still divides people today. 

Douthwaite was dissuaded from going to art school by the painter J D Fergusson, who felt it would crush her instinctive creativity. Certainly, the paintings, drawings and prints in this show seem to come hot-wired from the psyche, whether her subject is a mythical woman, an eminent art historian, the Manson murders or Mr Henry Dooley, her dalmation.

This group of works dates from the late 1950s, with the majority coming from the 1960s and 1970s. Her central preoccupation is the female figure, and her figures often feel like they are in motion, animated by some emotion bigger than themselves: writhing, howling, dancing (Douthwaite had been a dancer herself with Margaret Morris’ company).

These women entwine themselves with reptiles, wear peacocks in their hair, throw back their heads and scream. In ‘Worm Woman’, the creature and the woman become one. The subject of ‘Yellow Hair’ is so at one with her gesture that she becomes the scream. There are men, too, arguing with bared teeth in ‘The Fete’, or the art historian Bernard Berenson reduced to a toothy skeleton in a ridiculous invalid carriage. Douthwaite did a good line in black humour.

These visceral grotesques works are not easy to look at. I found her figures from the 1980s - ‘Madeleine’, ‘Indian Man’ and their ilk - gentler, though no less perceptive. There is also a striking landscape of Suffolk in snow, and one of Orkney in summer, which reduces the islands to their dual essences of land and sea. Douthwaite is an artist who deserves further examination - even if it might not be an entirely comfortable experience.

Online at the Scottish Gallery until 27 February 2021.