Douglas C

C. Douglas (b.1951) is the rarest of the rare Indian modernist artists who can capture his emotions in lines, colours, abstractions, and figurative allegories. Writing about Douglas’ early works, art critic Josef James records that instead of drawing and then colouring his works, Douglas went on to find abstractions with patterns, rhythms, and structures through brush strokes and colour values. The formal devices in his paintings, the grids, triangles, frames and horizontal lines had a rigorous and rigid formal beauty. When he was a student in the Madras College of Arts in the 1970s, Douglas would say that he learnt his draughtsmanship from his friend, K. Ramanujam, the principle of exposing the line from his teacher Santhanaraj, and the ideas of Madras movement from K.C.S. Paniker with whom he moved to the Cholamandal artist’s village.