DB: Thrown Away was different, more surrealistic and irrational, because I don’t know that the angel could be of any assistance here. This is a 1950’s ranch-type house which I used to be totally appalled by. I didn’t like that era of modern. I’ve come around completely to where I’m fascinated by little tract houses from the ’50’s. They’re beginning to look quaint after people build big, $400,000 houses.

MS: Forgive me for intruding, but the painting’s not about the house.

DB: No, it’s not. But it’s the setting for the event which is a woman basically being kicked out of the house, because the lawn is littered with all her possessions thrown out on the lawn, as well as she. And she’s nude and shivering in the fetal position; hot rollers, a suitcase, a makeup light, a typewriter, probably some letters and shoes.

MS: All the accoutrements of daily life.

DB: Yes. Her neighbor has been walking along the sidewalk and has stopped and seen her and is in shock. So maybe the angel is prompting the neighbor to walk up there and see what she can do to help.

MS: There was another painting which was in your last show, which is a scene of Cajun domestic abuse, Outta Here. This is a fairly common recurring theme in your work.

DB: Well, I’ve been interested in that from, probably as much as anything else, by all these television shows. I’m trying to think of the people in my own life who have been through that, and I really can’t say I’ve known specifically anyone, maybe some people I’ve worked with.

MS: But it disturbs you enormously.

DB: Yeah, you’re so repelled by it. I think the worst of it is when you hear the yelling, and it’s not just men. Either way it’s kind of that “I love you so much I’m going to beat you up.” It’s just so irrational that it drives you crazy, the thought that you could possess someone.

MS: Literally, as if they were an object.

DB: Again, that’s another thing that I still see in articles in the paper, where somebody comes up and kills the spouse and then kills himself or herself and the children. There’s no way you can process it, it’s so insane.

MS: Let me ask you this though, because quite frankly, while some painters such as Judy Chicago had addressed these sort of social themes, it is relatively unusual particularly in contemporary art.

DB: Maybe they do it in a more theoretical way, and a less visual, illustrative way I guess. Because when people ask me if it’s political, I don’t know if that’s the right word for it because it’s almost like the minute you call a work political it gets dull. Like it’s good for you. You think of it as almost a moral or allegory or just moral outrage.

MS: But what viewers take away, however, I think, is an enormous humanity and compassion and identification.

DB: That’s what I’m hoping. That’s why in that painting I have all these details: the children, a broken piggybank, the cab waiting outside, she’s got marks all over her face, her legs are totally black and blue. The things on the shelf represent maybe the cliché version of really poor male and female: there’s the eagle statue and then there’s a unicorn poster on the wall, and you think maybe she’s picked up this unicorn to say this guy’s a monster…

MS: Like Laura in the Tennessee Williams play?

DB: Yeah, and it is a cliche to say…this isn’t all men, obviously. It’s just one particular situation, because there are thousands and thousands of lower middle class and poor men who don’t do this. It’s an aberration, and that’s why we’ve got to…

MS: Make sure it remains a minor aberration. Well, tell me about The Basement, which is a little more complex than that.

DB: This is a horror fantasy, but also an allegory, a crucifixion pose where there’s a direct painting of Christ with a crown of thorns. This is a similar thing: a person in pain, in turmoil, and the rescuers have arrived. This woman next to him has brought loppers to get the thorns off. There’s peroxide, RID for lice, band aids and medicines, and Gatorade for dehydration, and then a tray of fresh food.

MS: So this angel’s arriving with more than trumpets and heavenly light.

DB: Right. These are two angels. Her partner’s brought the Wal-Mart bag full of medicinals, just like in the old days it would be wine and a loaf of bread, figs, something from ancient …

MS: Balm of Gideon?

DB: Right. And he’s brought shampoo for a bath. I don’t how he got here. If you look at it in a realistic way I don’t know it translates, but it is again another symbolic story.

MS: Well again as you were saying earlier in The Kitchen, you have here almost reluctant Samaritans; maybe all Samaritans are reluctant; they don’t plan on being there.

DB: Sometimes they do it and they know they have to do it and they just do it.

MS: It’s the moral human imperative to be there.

DB: They don’t think twice about it. But you can also say that these are friends or family or someone in that role who alleviates suffering of someone in some sort of mental torment. I have to point out that some of the paint cans in here I use — yes, sometimes I use real objects instead of from the newspaper — I had these cans of paint that I have used to paint the studio and my uncle came to a show and they were his brand at his store and he recognized it.

MS: Now one thing, despite him being wrapped in these vicious in thorns that she had to use the bolt cutters to relieve him of, he seems relatively unmarked.

DB: I don’t know if you can see here, there are little pricks here from the thorns, but I probably could have put more. I think if I did it today I would. But I used to be afraid in away to put blood in a painting. Then I just got inspired by seeing a lot of religious art or Goya and concluded, “Come on —what’s the problem?” People are Vessels of blood basically, and that’s the horror of violence.

MS: Let me move on to another painting, Two Poets on an Island. Again forgive me if I’m straying of my own associations — it reminds me of Grant Wood’s American Gothic?

DB: Yes, probably from the hairdo.

MS: And the stance even. And the juxtaposition of the male and female form. And yet, once having made that initial recognition, we are off into an entirely different visual universe.

Two Poets on an Island, 1991

DB: This is Emily Dickinson and a New York-based rapper, I think Brooklyn-Rakim. The recording duo at the time was Eric B. and Rakim. He was the lyricist and his partner was the turntable guy — the DJ. They had huge, huge success probably 1990-91, in that period. All these other youngsters still talk about him. He was sort of mysterious, and their lyrics were very intelligent. Although I don’t really know that much about him bio-graphically, I used to just listen to the music all the time. When I was in college I used to read Dickinson — I think I had to write a lot of papers on her — I thought she was a fascinating character.

MS: She is the one whose line was “a certain slant of light,” which is a unique kind of vision which certainly characterizes her work as well.

DB: There was something about her —

MS: You put Emily Dickinson and Rakim in water that is a fire.

DB: Male/female; she’s white, he’s black; she’s 19th century, he’s twentieth century.

MS: It’s layered with all those dichotomies in it. Let’s talk about several of these together now—you have a series of paintings that includes Under the Lens, which is a black Christ figure intruded upon by handguns and armored men.

DB: And video cameras too. And tape recorders just like this one.

MS: I don’t know if they’re related. They all have central figures. Queen Latifah is another one. Her Dreams Were Like Medicine is a third of this group, Sanctuary, I would say, is another. Can we talk about those four collectively?

DB: They’re kind of iconic in a way, where they’re smack in the center. They’re from different periods, so I don’t associate them as being the same, but particularly this one [Under the Lens] I think it’s more obvious, I’m consciously doing a kind of a Christ figure which is the ultimate sufferer or person enduring. At the time that I did this I did several others probably because I watch a lot of television and read a lot of newspapers and magazines and books and records.

MS: You’re very much involved in contemporary culture.

DB: After I did it people asked me if that was OJ Simpson, and I said “No it’s not at all!” I think I had started it before all of that happened. Granted, the media did overdo that particular story. But this was just in general, anyone who has been in some kind of trouble, had one sort of slip-up, and there was an overreaction to it. That’s why there are the cameras and the guns too, because as threatening as that is, they are all similarly invasive.

MS: Tell me something about A Woman from St. Gabriel. Here she’s not wearing a crown of thorns but a crown of snakes. Medusa-head, basically.

DB: In fact, when I first started it, she was going to be a Medusa, and after began drawing her I decided—Medusa is a monster, a Gorgon—I could see she wasn’t becoming a monster, so I thought, I said the snakes aren’t really growing out of her head, they’re woven into her hair, almost like a hat. They’re very comfortable with her. She’s basically a nature goddess.

MS: You have the frogs, the fecundity of the frogs.

DB: The cicada and these little caterpillars and birds.

MS: It’s a very peaceful bestiary. The first look is that it’s a Medusa-head, and I think that’s the viewer’s initial response, but then you force us to reframe our reaction.

DB: All of these snakes are Southern, or from Louisiana — the King snake, coral snake, corn snake, rainbow snake.

MS: The thing that’s interesting though again, as in a Douglas Bourgeois painting, there are at least three layers of experience in this painting in fairly quick order. First you see the Medusa head. You then look a little more closely at the painting you realize that’s incongruous with this beautiful, peaceful face. You look at the other — the frog and the cicada and the caterpillars and realize it’s a much more peaceful scene, it doesn’t carry any of the horror of the Medusa. And then as you look a little deeper into this painting you see in these far corners behind all the natural fecundity, again we have the appearance of the industrial, of the refineries and the industrial element that’s creeping, inescapable into the Louisiana landscape.

DB: No matter where you find the natural beauty, twenty feet away or maybe a few miles away, and there it is. Especially along the river, I guess that’s the thing, if you’re within twenty miles of the river you can see that. I couldn’t think of a name for her, so I drove around … I was looking for a house actually, a used house to buy …eventually I found one closer by… I was driving along River Road and I ended up in St. Gabriel and I thought “That’s it—The Woman From St. Gabriel.” It’s hard for me to talk any theories behind…

MS: Your artwork? What do you find easier?

DB: Yes. Because a lot of it I don’t really know what’s going on. I feel like I’m a conduit in a way, a radio receptor. I’ve told people that before, that I feel like a transistor. I think a lot of artists feel that way too—they’re getting it from somewhere else.

MS: I think that explains a lot of the tonalities.

DB: I’m different from a lot of artist, especially contemporary artists, who are much more intellectual than or academic; they have more ideas about what they do than I do.

MS: Just a few more, Doug, you’ve been very indulgent. Refrigerator is similar in some respects to the others, but again it’s this extraordinary insertion of the spiritual into these domestic scenes. And the detail—here you have the glow in this refrigerator, and in that refrigerator is sort of a cornucopia of cultural artifacts mixed in with the meat and the linked sausage and the Velveeta and the Cool Whip, which I’m sure connects you to contemporary life. Handguns and STP oil treatment and the globe itself and a brain, Ortho Weedbegone, cellular phone…

DB: Maalox, tequila, Vagisil, another gun, clown head, frozen pizza. This painting for some reason is darker for me then usual. I don’t know if you can say it’s spiritual; it’s a little more horrific than what I usually do.

MS: This “annunciation” is not shining light. It’s sort of a half-wedding cake, a perverse wedding cake annunciation crumbling away. What is this spilling from the can like blood spilling on the floor. Does the time have any significance?

DB: Beets. No. I just wanted to make sure it was a really revolting, funny-looking clock. When I did this other painting, I made the doll-cake really become a character and so consequently I did the painting after that, the other painting in which the doll-cake is the main character. Sometimes that happens. There’s a picture on the wall that became the next painting.

MS: A precursor.

DB: A precursor, right. That happens sometimes when the theme continues into the next.

MS: This is the one that I just saw at Arthur Roger Gallery that just staggered me. It’s unusual—it doesn’t have the usual formal structure, because it has so many parts imbedded in it, almost like a computer screen does now in which you can multitask and pull up all these different dimensions—and it doesn’t have therefore the other more traditional compositional elements of the other paintings. Nonetheless, as you focus on each of those frames within a frame …

DB: Almost too much to say with one segment. The woman is Afeni Shakur. It’s about Tupac Shakur’s mother, who [Tupac] was murdered by a handgun, I believe. The source of inspiration was images from Pieta or Christ passion type paintings. Especially of the wounds. This is one of my favorite paintings – the Giovanni Bellini Pieta, so I have a portion of that there.

MS: Many of these are famous. This one is too, isn’t it?

DB: Palmezzano. It was from a church calendar my parents got for me, since I’m not a regular churchgoer. But I make sure to get all their calendars because they have all these really nice reproductions. There are so many we never hear of because there are so many churches and so many paintings there. This one I particularly liked because of the look on his face. I changed it a little bit in that I changed the hair color – made it a little more olive than the original.

MS: But it’s the intrusion again of the handgun, destroying…

DB: Basically it was the horror at … comparing gun violence or… just listening to the news … after a while you just get so overwhelmed by it.

MS: We all become a crucifixion.

DB: And so it’s called The Daily Cross, like a newspaper, a daily…

MS: Could be a good name for a paper as a matter of fact. That’s how I feel in the morning. Every morning is a crucifixion to read that thing, they ought to call it The Daily Cross.

DB: Right. Because you read it and you think well maybe a long time ago people did these insane things and we never head about them, but then you realize no, they didn’t have drive-by strangulations. They didn’t have drive-by knifings. They killed one person at a time at least. Now it’s just almost taken for granted, mowing down people. It’s just insane. People say it’s anti-gun. Well no it’s an anti-gun violence or violence in general.

The chinks in the border — the words you see are actually taken from newspaper articles about these events. I would change the names of some of them if they were local, increase someone in the family saw it. I had national stories in there as well — Ennis Cosby, Versace, some in New Hampshire, California. There was one little girl, I think her dad took her to a McDonald’s and she was shot by people driving by.

MS: Let me ask you this. Living out here in the quietude of Ascension Parish — unlike someone like myself who lives in the middle of New Orleans in the faubourg Marigny adjacent to the French Quarter — why would someone living in such a peaceful place as this have these anxieties and concerns about pointless death appearing?

DB: I don’t feel that’s an immediate threat in a way, but just concern for the way the general gist of things are going. Even out here crime is increasing. We’ve had some horrendous things that have happened in the parish, but they were mostly directed at people who were successful business people. There was a couple who were invaded in their home and shot. They lived though, and they’re still looking for these people and they think it maybe someone who preys on older people. That’s really an immediate actual thing. Everywhere you go shopping now in Ascension or in Gonzales you see this police sketch now, and that’s something that used to not be. You say quiet, but I’d say relative quiet.

MS: Let’s talk about the painting The Vacation. The trailer looks like it’s in the middle of the Vanderbilt estate in Asheville.

DB: There was a picture from an old magazine I had. I’ve always wanted to paint a trailer for one thing, because that’s so predominant here as an inexpensive way to live.

MS: It certainly gives one the sense that life is transient.

DB: I found I wanted to do a more colorful one, the older style trailers. Every now and then I’ll see one parked and abandoned with vines growing over everything. I got the idea that they were this loose family group, you don’t really know their relationship. They’re married, banded together out of desperation. There are, I think, three adults, one baby, a subteen —she’s probably about ten years old, maybe eight years old, and then a solemn adolescent over here.

MS: Your basic family.

DB: Yes. And that’s their vacation. They’re parked on someone’s property. There’s a sign here that says “No Entry Private Property” and they’re in the field, and behind the fence the lawn is still being mowed. It is a mansion back here, an old estate, but it’s obviously not what it used to because this has been fenced off and then all these wild flowers and ferns have grown up, so there’s sort of a borrowing of space.

MS: Are your sympathies with them in that living in such a sterile and empty kind of life that this is the only kind of vacation they can hope for, or do you find them an intrusion into the natural landscape?

DB: No, not really. I think they’re kind of enjoying it. Maybe they’ll stay until someone asks them to leave, could be two or three days. I see them as sort of camping. It’s basically sort of a tender look at people who don’t have very much. The woman has tattoos and a big bottle of liquor by her chair. You see people like that when you go anywhere, especially maybe in Baton Rouge. People who just look like they have a hard life and they’re trying to buy things at Wal-Mart for their kids, getting ready for school or whatever. I have enormous sympathy for the details of their lives, how they treat the children at home in this particular painting.

MS: Back to something I said earlier, saying it slightly differently … I think you have such a gift — you describe yourself earlier as a conduit — you have such a gift for filtering through your own consciousness and your own art things that would pass by most of us and be dismissed as simply mundane or pedestrian or artifacts of the lowest sort of a commercial culture —health and beauty aids, bunion removers, and Naugahyde chairs in cheap motels — and yet you see all these things and they are part of the landscape as much as the natural flora and fauna are.

DB: They’re hard to ignore.

MS: And you give them a pressing reality that is hard to ignore, and that pressing reality surfaces with such an urgency in your work and becomes truly the landscape for your artistic vision. Absolutely wonderful.

DB: Thank you very much. LCV