"About the Artist"

About the Artist

            Doug Cover was born in Green Bay, WI, and grew up in Oakland CA, where he managed to flunk the only art class he took in high school. After high school he moved to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco and took advantage of the opportunities provided by the sixties to thoroughly explore alternative states of consciousness. After spending several years recovering from his over-indulgences he resumed his education and in 1989, after attending art classes at Laney College, he received a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received a BFA in painting in 1993.

           He currently lives and paints in Oakland, and works as a substitute teacher in Oakland middle schools.

He has shown his work at Turn of the Century Fine Arts in Berkeley as well as several cafes, and a library and he maintains a gallery of his paintings at an apartment house in Oakland. Viewings are by appointment only and may be arranged through the artist.

        “Painting for me is a dialogue between myself and the work. I generally have no preconception of what a painting will be like until I start painting. The work takes shape in the process of painting as each piece reveals to me what it wishes to be. The work is generally abstract, but it always contains allusions to ideas and concepts that go beyond the formal qualities of a piece. The ideas in the paintings often are inspired by the extensive reading I have done in poetry, philosophy, alchemy and the hermetic tradition, and may include allusions to Greek mythology, existential philosophy, Buddhism, ancient Sumerian culture and Jungian psychology. When I am painting I think of myself as a conduit for the ideas I find important.

        My latest series is based on a dense layering of horizontal lines. They are related to landscape painting in that all landscapes are based on the horizon line. These paintings simplify the “landscape” to the horizon(tal) line alone, repeated over and over. In this way they tend to replicate the layering of sediment in soil. They also reflect the passage of time, as each new day brings a new horizon.

        The poems are an outgrowth of the paintings. In showing the paintings to friends and others I am often asked to, or am tempted to, provide explanations of the more abstract work. I am never very satisfied with the explanations, and so I have written poems which I hope will provide all the elucidation necessary to provide full comprehension of my artistic intentions. Feel free to ignore the poems if you feel comfortable providing your own interpretations of the paintings .

        I designed and built this website myself from the ground up. I shot the slides of the artwork, and had them scanned onto discs at Clone Art Works in Berkeley, and cropped, touched up and compressed the images using Jasc Paint Shop Pro. I designed and developed the website using Microsoft FrontPage, and the little bit of HTML I know. I do want to thank Greg Cover for giving me a computer loaded with FrontPage, and Warren Wilson and Jack and Helen Cover for financial help with this project. I also want to thank you for logging on to my website, and for reading this far into my statement.

        Comments, questions and criticisms are always welcome. You can send me a message via the Contact the Artist link on the home page."