Oliver Akers Douglas
NEW PAINTINGS

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Akers Douglas's painting is poetic but unpretentious. At one level, these are simply images of fields and trees; occasionally a path bisects the lushness, a tiny house or farm building. The vision is pleasing: this, after all, is how country ought to look - permanent, uncompromising, rich and beautiful. At another level, each is an artist's experiment, a study in how truthfully to convey in paint the vigour of an image that is never still, never free from the shadows of shifting weather, the scars of passing seasons. He paints without self-indulgence enormous, muscular skies, walls of trees, sandbanks of ripening crops - layering the paint thickly, dewily to create an impression that mirrors its subject's fecundity. He applies the same bravura technique to his still lifes, figure studies and portraits, so that the method of painting is as much a part of these pictures as the subject. In his painting he expresses a vision that is personal in a style that is his own, but in doing so attains the goal of every representative artist, finding eternity in each moment and snapshot of being.

Matthew Dennison, London, 2004


Oliver Akers Douglas (30) trained at Camberwell School of Art, and has been the beneficiary of numerous art prizes and a substantial art bursary. Included in this, his second one-man exhibition, are landscapes inspired by locations as diverse as the Yorkshire countryside, London skyscapes and the Irish coastline. Akers Douglas also undertakes portrait commissions.