Written by Gabriela Bartolo
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Shirley Dougan sports a free and enthusiastic approach to painting. Through her experimental practice, she has challenged her former perfectionist tendencies and created a space for personal liberation and play. In this, she offers a model for artists and art lovers alike, to use art as an avenue for relief from the constraints of life.
Shirley Dougan
In her journey to painting, Shirley found other mediums more accessible, where the pressure to be ‘realistic’ in representation did not apply. She is skilled in various crafts, such as embroidery, model and character making, and beyond. It was in a short explorative painting course that the instructor changed Shirley’s mind about the potentials of a painted composition.
“There was something that she did which kind of opened my eyes. She did some negative painting, that is, bringing out the objects that she wanted to see by painting around them. That was quite magical.”
Mystery Road, Levisham, North Yorkshire | 61 x 45cm, Acrylic on canvas
From this, Shirley developed a unique style, which utilises an eclectic variety of materials. She begins with swiping colour over the canvas with a credit card, and then forms layers and shapes with stamps, which she creates from a dense recycled foam.
“The stamps never print perfectly, which I really like because of the accidents they create. If I’m working on another painting, I usually have an empty canvas next to me, and I’ll paint on that with any leftover paint from the painting I’m working on. What’s important is just covering the white mass of the canvas, because that’s intimidating.”
First on the Beach | 101 x 75cm, Acrylic on canvas
In this, she mixes new blends of colour, and is not afraid to make marks ‘outside the lines’, while working from reference images. These reference images are not strict guides, but important inspiration for Shirley. They are mostly images she has taken from places she has been, which she then adapts to execute her creative vision.
A Still and Solemn Power | 61 x 31cm, Acrylic on canvas
Shirley approaches her artistic practice with intuition. After building up experimental textures with her stamps, she will add details with her favourite dagger-style brush. With multiple works in progress at once, she dances with the process, as she leaves and returns to them with fresher eyes. There are exciting potentials that come with this. “I’m getting more adventurous because when you stamp, weird things can happen, like houses have appeared in my landscapes, even if they aren’t meant to be there.”
She’s found much more abstract material coming through in her work too.
“I’ll look at something and think, I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t matter. My way of deciding what to keep and what not to keep is, I ask myself the question, what would it be if it wasn’t there? It may just be boring. Instead, it’s a happy accident.”
Opening Up | 61 x 45cm, Acrylic on canvas
Regardless of how unrestrained Shirley describes her process, she also has developed a distinct aesthetic. In this, she aims for a balance between opposing forces in the formal qualities. What is perceptible in Shirley’s work is an energy behind the landscape, whether it be in what she calls “the weird patterns behind the clouds,” or the residue left by the last dry stamps. She expressed that she is inspired by the recessive perspective techniques of the Old Masters of Europe, in the science of placing warm and cool colours in the fore and background.
“I work in a colourful but recognisable style. I’m big on contrast, not just in colour, but in shapes, and in sizes of shapes, and in placement of things. I’m working with the contrast between chaotic things and calm things.”
The Reward Appears | 51 x 41cm, Acrylic on canvas
Beyond this, Shirley wants to leave as much space as possible for the magic of her work to be felt organically.
“You don’t have to explain everything. The viewer will fill in all the blanks that you’ve implied with their own imagination. You’ve got to trust people to know what things look like, after all, they have lived lives and can recognise things. I’m trying to recreate the feeling I have when I’m standing on the cliff edge looking out, or onto the ocean.”
Midweek Drive, Yarra Valley | 76 x 51cm, Acrylic on canvas
Imagination is vital to experiencing Shirley’s work, and the world she creates within. As her practice develops with time, she feels more confident in working without a plan or outside of the lines, embracing the natural idiosyncrasies of making marks on a canvas. She is adapting her unique textural exploration by scratching into paint using textured paste, and getting messy with it, in a more embodied process. To her, this gradual relinquishing is part of growing as a human being, not just an artist.
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