ABOUT

Working from life is the way I love to paint. Through observing reality, I can explore translucency, reflections and luminosity, all the ways light can transform our perceptions.

After attending Stanford University, I studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Post school, I worked as an art director for a number of years in Los Angeles and New York and later began to focus more on painting.

My early works were in a suburban surrealism mode. While painting the American landscape, houses and gardens, mostly from imagination, I also drew and painted extensively from the figure. A bit later, I began painting still lives of food, toys, candy and household objects. It wasn’t long before still life painting became my main interest.

I have been in many group shows across the country as well as four one person shows. My paintings are in many private  collections. I was also chosen to do a residency at Fundación Valpariaso in Andalusia Spain in 2012. I live and work in Brooklyn, NY with my wife, the painter Kathleen Migliore-Newton. We are lucky to share our brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn with our daughter, her husband and our granddaughter.

An essay about my paintings 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)

Interviews

A video interview with me on the LaGuardia Community College radio and tv station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ_sRKz5KEs [youtube.com]

The March/April, 2018 edition of ArtDiction magazine is titled Culinary Arts and features a nine page article about my paintings of food.

An article in ArtsyShark

I'm featured in an article on ArtsyShark, an online marketing site for artists. A nice writeup on my painting. 

https://www.artsyshark.com/2017/08/31/featured-artist-douglas-newton/

I am featured on Jung Katz artist’s blog in an interview by Casey Webb: Douglas Newton Realistic oil painter with a strong abstract quality.  http://jungkatz.com/2016/02/25/interview-with-painter-douglas-newton/

A short video of my wife Kathleen and myself about our experiences as artists,done by Mathilde Hamel:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8QK8k8rNFc

An interview with me on the Art Book Guy blog http://artbookguy.com/douglas-newton-light-transforming_1092.html

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