Loren Doucette

Loren Doucette, The Story at the Farm A Mother’s Love

GAR Gloucester Invitational Artist: Loren Doucette
October 2024

The Gloucester Invitational was created to offer a talented Gloucester artist the opportunity to experiment and explore new directions. They are provided a stipend and are asked to present an opening talk at the beginning of their one-month residency and a closing talk in their studio at the end.

Loren Doucette lives in Gloucester, MA working as a full-time painter. Her work has shown in solo and group exhibitions since 2006. She received a BFA in Drawing and Painting in 2013 from Montserrat College of Art where she participated in Montserrat’s study-abroad program in Italy. It was there that landscape painting became a stabilizing force in her work. Using Oil, Acrylic, Pastel and Gouache, her work includes architectural landscapes unique to Gloucester’s harbor, vibrant floral paintings, emotional figurative work and abstractions that come from the bones of all three subjects. Her paintings are prayers hovering between realism and abstraction and celebrating the sun, flowers, people and color of this world.

My work is a search, an asking, a prayer. Even though the subjects are sometimes recognizable as landscape, flowers or figures, it is about recalibration, remembering, revisiting, reconstruction and discovery. I mainly use three mediums: oil, acrylic and pastel. I use oil for its heaviness; the messy squishing and sloshing takes me to more unruly places than acrylic can. I use acrylic on the other hand for its vibrancy. Its quick drying qualities allow me to draw into the work in between paint layers. Finally, pastel is where I draw and construct from flowers and landscape with overlying abstraction and color experimentation. Within all these mediums, I am searching for a new discovery to unfold both in the materials and spiritual content.

Loren’s website: lorendoucetteart.com