The small-scale figurative oil paintings of Douglas Bourgeois are enigmatic situations featuring one or two people in heightened landscapes or interiors. Some of the paintings are fictional portraits of unknown subjects looking at the viewer. Others are biographical fantasies, tributes to obscure recording artists. Inspirations are Deep Soul and Gospel music, primitive rock and roll, vernacular religious imagery, and discarded paper ephemera. The overwhelming natural landscape of South Louisiana, a beautiful vanishing Eden, is a primary influence. A connecting thread in the paintings and collages is the juxtaposition of the degraded and the sacred, light and darkness, the mundane and the transcendent.
