WORK BY DOUG MACWITHEY FROM CORSICANA
From the collection of Karan Verma, curated by David Searcy and Karan Verma.
April 26 - October 31, 2025.
From “Nameless,” David Searcy’s essay on Doug MacWithey in Shame and Wonder (Random House, 2016):
I think such spaces (as the huge old Odd Fellows structure) meant to him a kind of endlessness. Historical and physical. Whatever concentrated, pared-away-to-almost-nothing bit of art he did, he wanted to be endless (or at least part of something endless). As if nothingness and endlessness depended on each other.
It took a while to get a sense of what he’d left behind. He had a kind of system but it wasn’t known to others, and it changed from time to time: the way he’d think about those hundreds of accumulating pages tucked away in plastic folders (he imagined a sort of book); how they referred to one another; to their source, an early-seventeenth-century series of alchemical engravings called “The Seals of the Philosophers,”…
Imagine him up there, those great high windows propped wide open to let the summer air come through. To get a breeze. To keep from sweating on the paper (usually new, white eleven-by-twelve-inch sheets or old, browned five-by-seven-inch notebook pages, three-hole-punched to demonstrate provisionality, that these are only notes and therefore endless). Having to stand away a little, then lean in to do it quickly, trace the circles with a pencil and a crumpled pie-tin template. Imperfect struggle of a circle. Stand away and wipe his face. The sounds outside, distinct, immediate small-town noises. Some cicadas maybe, mostly trains and pickup trucks and voices. And one time quite late at night, like three or four, when he would usually be up working, someone walking down the street all by himself and singing loudly, as he passed, the silly jingle to a well-known cat-food commercial - hard to render here of course, without appropriate notation, but whose chorus, sung by cats, consisted solely of meows reiterated to a happy little march that seemed intended to continue on and on - meow, meow - with touching mindlessness forever down the street into the dark. But wipe his face and take the paint - orange paint, unmixed, straight from the drugstore or wherever Karan bought it, straight from the common, collective notion of orange paint - and lean in quickly keeping, carefully as a child, within the line to paint it orange, to paint out all that marvelous circus-poster allegory, get back to the blankness of that moment just before. Just hold it there within that ionizing moment as we wait for a flash of meaning - Calid the Jew, Hermes or heaven or whatever - to arrive. To find that potent state of mind before we know what we’re imagining exactly.
Douglas MacWithey, artist, 1952 – 2010.
Images below: Allison V. Smith, “Doug MacWithey studio, 2nd-floor 100 West,” 2010.
