Keith Douglas Art Reception
La Divina Italian Cafe
Baton Rouge
Feb. 13
Getting a caricature done is an act of vulnerability. Someone is intently looking at your face, and you never know what features they’ll accentuate. It’s a vibe check. It’s a moment in time interpreted through someone else’s eyes. According to artist Keith "Cartoonman" Douglas, it’s also a way to see someone’s personality.
Douglas is the featured artist at La Divina, an Italian cafe/restaurant that features local artists on their walls. A teacher, an artist and a prolific caricaturist, he says he has drawn over 300,000 caricatures since 1968. (The math works out to be a little over 14 caricatures a day.) His work ranges from public figures like the entire Louisiana state legislature, former Bov. John Bel Edwards and Danny Glover to random people he sees at public events. His featured works at La Divina are his drawings of crabs and surreal houses and shops inspired by Southern Louisiana architecture.
At his opening reception last night, the focus was on his caricature work.
The night was a laid-back affair with wine and hors d'oeuvres. Some people ordered food. Others didn’t. Regardless, there were little booklets of prints on the tables to flip through, and the live music was instrumental guitar by Jeff Bajon, which gave the night a chill soundtrack. One could come with friends or their family, drop by and chat a while even if they didn’t know the event was happening. In the meantime, Douglas hard was at work, drawing everyone who came in on a giant sketchbook.
Drawing is second nature to him, he explained while drawing my caricature. He has drawn every day he can remember except for 13 days, and it helps him see people in a different way. Watching him work was fascinating. Why did he draw some people with a smile and others with a more neutral expression? What is the threshold for a round face vs a longer one? Does everyone think my forehead is this big?
Caricature makes the ordinary weird, and that can give perspective. Among his print booklets, Douglas showed some of his political cartoons which feature the same techniques but as a comment on the current administration. It’s so easy to walk into a room full of people, and kind of let all the faces blur together. Kind of like how it’s easy to doomscroll and let the headlines about the bad things happening in the world blur together. But Douglas’ art encourages people to really look at the world and the people in it. The longer I sat there, the more I found myself studying people’s faces, trying to see what he saw.
One can see the same kind of eye on the world in his displayed work on the walls. Douglas has crafted a world of colorful buildings, giant crabs, tall gumbo shacks on stilts, and more. This is Louisiana. Douglas’ group caricature of everyone who came to the art reception, including the workers who staffed it is a little window into that world too. It feels significant that he didn’t just create mini portraits of each individual person like many artists do. This was a community event, and this is the first, and likely only time, all these individuals would be at this place at this time. He said he plans to make prints so people can come back and get a copy.
