PROTANOPIA BLUE EXHIBIT

Protanopia Blues was an exciting exhibit by Diggity Douglas (AKA Dave). Dave draws inspiration from Dalì’s brand of surrealism and makes it his own by integrating unique colour play and symbolically caricatured features in his varied but strangely familiar illustrations. While the framing and proportions of many of the pieces in this series might allude to the previous Ice Cream Series, the Protanopia Blues is unique in the way it tackles issues of self-awareness, substance abuse and the artist’s colour blindness.

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVE

Interviewed by Hepsi Nelson

T&C: Hi Dave, from your painting to photography, we know that you use a lot of different kinds of art and mediums. Is there any reason to why you use one medium for something more than another?

D: I usually use drawing as a medium to conceptualize ideas. It’s like the genesis of my surrealist endeavors to put it really weirdly. I try drawing out my ideas and then transferring them to paint, to solidify them as more professional and unique and colorful ways of just expressing myself. Usually pen or pencil to start the idea, and then acrylic to make a quick flash painting, and then oil to finish it off with deeper color bases.

T&C: And in what ways has your personal background and life experiences influenced your Surrealist art? Were there any specific turning points that significantly shaped anything that you do?

D: I come from a predominantly Spanish background. I was born in Spain, and the Spanish masters of the 20th century influenced me the most, because those were who I was exposed at the beginning. Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, those were the starting points for me to base my influence on. Slowly I developed my own style through that, touching into abstract and Surrealism and portraiture, and combining the three. My influences also extend to Australia and Africa, because I’ve been to those countries and I’ve seen their art, and they’ve influenced me, the tribal colors and all that. My past experiences have developed my signature as an artist.

T&C: Is surrealism the only aspect of art that you go into? Obviously, your photography is more of a hobby, but in terms of your art, is it just always surrealism or has it always been surrealism?

D: Yes, for the most part. I try to dabble more into other aspects if I’m experimenting. Surrealism and cubism are my safe places. I started off in high school doing realism and charcoal drawings to see if I could capture more accurate lighting. I developed my professional abilities as a life drawer to develop the rules so that I could break them later. That’s something that Picasso says, that if you want to learn how to break the rules, you should learn how to actually do them first. Follow the basic principles of lighting, shape and proportion, and then you can learn to mess around with the subject. I find that learning about art in school, we’re always taught realism first and foremost. If you are going to study art, it’s always realism first and foremost, and they never really push for other things.

T&C: How do you think surrealism has grown or been integrated into pop culture in recent years?

T&C: Could you tell us a bit more on how your color blindness affects your work, or the way that it interacts with your work? We find that many people often use their personal experiences as source of inspiration, has that been the case with yours?

D: In the beginning, I didn’t really notice it much, and didn’t really use it to my advantage. I noticed it here and there when I was doing certain things like rock climbing, I would be climbing in the wrong colour and things like that. Little by little people started telling me, I think you have a slight colour problem. I went about experimenting with it through painting and realised that my colours were a bit skewed. That actually gives me an edge in colour blending, so I incorporated that into my art. Little by little, I went about creating my own colour palette and an interesting personalised way of expressing different saturations and things like that. My colour blindness is called protanopia, which is a deficiency in reds and greens, but I don’t know how accurate that is based on online tests. You can only trust those so much. I have difficulties with colours that are really similar, so yellows and greens, purples and blues, things like that. If colours are too similar, then I can’t really distinguish between them sometimes. My intention for this new exhibition was to create really contrasting colors, with not a white background, but a black background, to make them pop out even more, to give them a sort of depth that really isn’t seen that much in painting. Blues and reds, there’s a lot of blues and reds. Which is funny because blues and reds really, for me, don’t go well together. If I ever see someone wearing blue and red, I’m like, ooh. In terms of the painting, I was like, you know, these actually work together in terms of contrasting.There’s a lot of reds and pinks that I found very fascinating, because whether it was on purpose or not, there were certain paintings that were telling parts of the story that were a bit more intense than on the other ones, and I found that very interesting.For this series, I just wanted to really contrast the colors that were trying to work together.

T&C:  And in terms of your personal community, we know that building an artist and a creative community in Hong Kong can be fairly difficult. Is it something that you struggled with and have you found more of a community or built one?

D: Yeah, I mean the barrier in language between us Gwailo, white folk, and the foreigners and the locals can be difficult sometimes. That’s why you don’t really see that many foreigners collaborating with local artists. And I feel like that’s bridging slowly. Recently, I did an exhibition in Tsim Sha Tsui with the M+ Heath collaboration. And that was really something special for me because I got to collaborate with a lot of local Cantonese-based artists who I would have never heard about if I’d never done something like that. So yeah, it’s just about bridging the connection between the different cultures. Because Hong Kong is just a cultural hub.