Douglas Allen
Exhibition May 15 – July 3, 2021
Tierra Del Sol presents Douglas Allen’s solo exhibition Keep on Trucking. Allen has worked out of the Tierra Studios since 2009.
Keep on Trucking highlights Allen’s bold colored pen and pencil drawings, inspired by his long-held desire to be a truck driver. He imagines big rig trucks in pop colored landscapes with hills and roads depicting Southern California cities and towns that he often references by name.
Dialogue plays an important role in Allen’s process and work. His speech bubbles are reminiscent of Lichtenstein, particularly the original rendering of In the Car, 1963. Like Lichtenstein, Allen draws inspiration from popular culture. He watches the reality TV series “Cops” to hear the language of engagement, than transfers these encounters to his work where the trucks are always the focal point and the police are often in dazzling psychedelic uniforms with disco boots.
In the pop art tradition, Allen uses vivid colors, particularly fuchsia to define the patterns and shapes of his compositions. In the classic style of Tom Wesselmann, the aggregate geometry forms into recognizable objects that fill the canvas with big rigs in dense color fields and sometimes with pink clouds or lime green hillsides. Like Warhol, Allen intuitively employs advertising, integrating its lexicon of words and signs into the landscape, graphically rendering entire scenes of a trucker’s life on the road.
Douglas Allen leans toward pop art tones and imagery of everyday trucks hauling loads over cobblestoned streets and rural highways. His practice and purpose adopts the genre’s more serious criticality to examine what he sees. His visual language describes the intersection and sometimes tension between commerce and the police state, concerns that reverberate through local communities everywhere. More important here is Allen’s desire as a maker to create work that resonates and excites his viewers. He wants us to encounter his compositions and say that this is the work of a good artist, and it is.
Keep on Trucking is on view at Tierra Del Sol Gallery from May 15 through July 3, 2021.
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