Throughout his career, Douglas has painted different styles and mediums simultaneously with equal ease, the nature and call of the subject determining the approach. His only criterion is to make sure every fourth or fifth painting is abstract, to keep the vision pure.
The subject of this pastel, Deauvil, or Deauville, is a lovely seaside town on the Normandy coast that has been a holiday resort since the 1880s. Everybody dresses up for Deauville. Only an hour by train from Paris, it is full of showy events and entertainments, as this explosion of energy and colour suggests.
Douglas has a personal connection to the town. His adopted French family Nelly and Claude Finet have a country house there, so he was often a house guest on breaks away from the city.
1969 was a strenuous year for MacDiarmid, experimenting with new materials and travelling to New Zealand, Mexico, New York, London, the French Alpes and Morocco. Workwise it was an unsettling period, trying to make sense of a growing body of opinion in France that painting was dead as an art form and fathom his way ahead. Ultimately, Douglas rekindled his belief in painting, and France, and took up his brushes with renewed purpose and passion.
He lived in Deauvil for a while in 1987, during unexpectedly long renovations to a newly-acquired Montmartre apartment that was to become the first house he and his partner Patrick finally lived in together after almost 20 years as a couple. All of his paintings and possessions were in storage and he was at a loose end. In a letter to New Zealand cousins he wrote: “Instead of falling onto the ground and biting the rushes, I’ve come to Deauville where I’ve been lent a lovely flat and am getting rid of accumulated weariness with long nights, good food and bracing walks by the sea…The sky here is as bleu as some theatrical version of childhood memory.”
