Doug Paisley grew up in and around Cleveland, Ohio, and currently works and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He attended the Boston Museum School and received his BA from Bennington College.
He works primarily with oil and acrylic, on canvas, wood panels, and Tyvek. His images sometimes engage literary texts: Kenneth Patchen’s The Journey of Albion Moonlight inspired a series of monoprints with the same title; another set of images—a “rogue’s gallery” of portraits (acrylic panels) and a group of larger paintings of hands—tangle with Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and, more broadly, with American figures of “confidence.” Paintings untethered from specific literary works also gesture to figures and stories, at once familiar and lost, that charge our own landscapes. Propelled by “unmodern” artistic passions—for paint, for the tradition of painting, and for the histories at once acknowledged and lost in that tradition—Paisley’s work opens to our own moment, saturated by what we can neither remember nor forget.