Small, skewed pictures that cast a spell: the art of Mollie Douthit
In this clever, moving mosaic of a book, Sara Baume tells us she originally wanted to be an art critic and that she wrote exhibition catalogue copy. It has served her well, as Opening Night is an evolved form of that genre – including 39 excellently reproduced images of paintings by the subject, and one extra – but it is also a form of memoir. By that I do not mean ‘life writing’ or ‘autofiction’, as it is a work of remembering and memorialising, even if that involves recording the gaps and lapses. The lacunae operate like an undercoat: the occluded thing that changes how you see. Just before the pandemic, Baume states in the opening sentence: ‘I met Mollie’s paintings before I met Mollie.
