The great masters of classical music play a sigificant role in the paintings of Doug Oliver, a nationally recognized landscape artist. "My parents were classically trained musicians and introduced me to classical music concerts as a child. While sitting in a concert hall at age nine, I'd look up at the darkened dome ceiling and fantasize about the sky and clouds, and about soaring through the heavens. All this of course was accompanied by the music of Brahams, Mozart and Rachmaninoff."
Few artists are better able to appreciate the connection between fine music and the visual arts than Oliver, who would later realize that hearing a grand symphony could actually help him in creating a grand landscape on canvas. And, much as composers write symphonic tone poems in their work, he has endeavored to create the same sort of variations visually so that an observer may find new things in a painting long after seeing it for the first time.
Oliver was born in Ohio in 1942 and moved to California with his family in 1954. He attended the prestigious Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and recieved his BFA degree there. Afterwards, he began a career in ar education, teaching at a local high school and community college. He earned his MA degree from the University of Redlands, California, but he soon left teaching to pursue his dream of devoting all his energies to painting.
With young children at home and the security of a tenured teaching position now gone, Oliver began a mid-life career change with some trepidation. In less than a year, however, he found his artwork for sale in several California fine art galleries. Today, premier art galleries in art centers throughout the country purvey his dramatic landscapes.
Oliver's works can be found in art galleries throughout the West and are distributed worldwide. Corporate and public collections including his landscapes are the Bank of America, Columbia Studios, TRW, Toyota Motors of America, and several municipalities outside of Los Angeles where he continues to maintain his home and studio. He and his wife have two adult sons, and his wife is the owner of a custom framing gallery.
Says Doug Oliver: "I really didn't choose to be an artist, I guess. I think that art chose me. There are a lot of things I can't do, but I can communicate with people visually a lot better than most. And because I believe that talent is God-given, and because I've developed my talent as much as I can through academic and fine art studies, I've committed myself to doing the best I can. I just want people to be able to see the landscape around them and appreciate it every day. We all need to be reminded of beauty sometimes. I guess my role in life is to remind people to really see their environment a little better, not in a political sense, but in the sense of truly appreciating it. I'd like people to be able to 'hear' the color and 'feel' the grandeur of music in my landscape."
