Catherine Marshall, former Head of Collections at IMMA, has written of Mollie Douthit that she “shows extraordinary maturity for a very young artist. She paints objects so commonplace in everyday experience that they would be comic, were they not painted with such seriousness and such careful study…… Douthit’s wonderful little canvases ask us simply to look at them, at the painting process, at existence itself.” (The Irish Arts Review, Winter, 2014).
Douthit places her work in the tradition of 18th century still life painters, most notably Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and his depictions of everyday objects. She is also drawn to the stillness found in the work of Giorgio Morandi and Gwen John. Contemporary influences include Alice Neel, Chantal Joffe and Peter Drecher. “These painters allow paint to speak for itself, for the subject and for a moment in time,” she says. “With their own language, they each extend something beyond the surface of a painting.”
Although technically more challenging, Douthit likes to work wet on wet, enjoying the fluidity of the medium. If she is unsure of the direction a painting needs to go in she will put it to one side, ruminating on it, before deciding on the direction it needs to take.
Born in the US, Douthit studied at the University of North Dakota and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She completed her MFA at the Burren College of Art 2014. Douthit won the Hennessy Craig Award at the 2013 RHA Annual Exhibition and has been shortlisted for the Saatchi Art New Sensation Prize and the John Moores Painting Prize. She was awarded an Arts Council bursary in 2023.
As well as three solo exhibitions at The Molesworth Gallery, she has also had solo shows at the RHA Ashford Gallery and at the Northwest Arts Centre in North Dakota. She has shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London and is a regular exhibitor at the RHA Annual Exhibition.