Pat Douthwaite
July 28, 1934 – July 26, 2002
Artist and Dancer
Pat Douthwaite was a Scottish artist who was notably compared to Modigliani and Soutine, the peintres maudits of early twentieth-century Paris.
Douthwaite was born in Glasgow and lived a nomadic life throughout Europe until her death in Dundee. She was born July 28, 1934, but claimed that she was born in 1939. Douthwaite took expressive dance and ballet classes from 1947 at age thirteen and decided to be a painter later in her life at age twenty-four without any form education in art. Without any teaching in art, she expresses the suffering of being a woman in the early 1900s in her works and is featured in seven different museums.
Margaret Morris and J.D. Fergusson are considered major influences in her life and taught the expressive dance classes that Douthwaite attended. Fergusson was a landscape artist and only taught Douthwaite how to appreciate the light interacting with a landscape. She continued to dance and was a part of Morris's Celtic Ballet in 1954 at Jacob's Pillow Theatre in Massachusetts U.S.A. After Morris and Fergusson, Douthwaite discontinued dancing as a career option.
In 1958 Douthwaite took up painting but continued without any education in art. She previously met William Crozier in Glasgow, Scotland, and moved into his house in Essex, England almost as a commune.
In 1967, Richard Demarco saw Pat Douthwaite as a talented Scottish artist and displayed her Mary Queen of Scots in his Edinburgh gallery. In 1967 he debuted her Love Pictures as well. In 1972-79 her Paintings and Drawings were showed at the Talbot Rice Art Centre and then in 1982 Worshipped Women was introduced by Robert Graves at the Edinburgh Festival. In London, 1982-83 Douthwait also had exhibitions in the Royal College of Art and then in the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, 1999-89. She had a solo exhibition in 1993 at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh of her more recent and final works.
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