A Poet Asks a Painter

Poet Sarah Audsley asks painter Mollie Douthit some questions for Shenandoah’s Spring 2025 Issue.

SA: What a pleasure to be featuring your work in Shenandoah’s Spring 2025 Issue. It is extra special since I have watched your career grow and develop over the years, since we met in November 2018 at Vermont Studio Center, where we both spent a month-long residency. That time was formative for me as a poet, and I was wondering how you think of that residency, now, for you and your own work. With the clarity of retrospection–how has your work changed or developed since that time?

MD: I am so excited to have this conversation with you, and feel fortunate to be here. That time in Vermont was defining for me. I struggled with the setup, and took this as a huge positive. The separation of eating meals and sleeping a few blocks from my studio felt clunky, and didn’t provide flow. I became acutely aware of how intertwined my life and work are, and that is critical to my work. However, I met so many people I am still in contact with. I was starved of creative relationships at the time, and meeting many creatives was restorative. I have held on to many of those connections and value them. Secondly, that was the first road trip I took with Jane, my 2004 XC70 Volvo, who I loved dearly. We drove from North Dakota to Vermont, taking a route that brought me through Canada. I experienced the first snow of the year on that drive and some very quirky motels. On the way home I drove to see a friend in Vermont for Thanksgiving and then through Michigan along the coast, taking mainly highways instead of the interstate. I felt like I had found myself in that car. I sold her in 2022 after knowing I was going to stay in Ireland (I moved back to Ireland in 2020). She was the hardest thing to let go of, the last piece of my life in America to make the move definitive.

Since then, my process for creating work has changed, but the content has remained the same. In Vermont I was making faster paintings, and painting directly the things around me, like a live visual diary. Now I paint slowly, from my memory, and on a significantly larger scale.

SA: A follow-up question: I am interested in the concept of scale and how the physical dimensions of the canvas can shape an approach or engagement with subject matter. (Here, I’m thinking about the parallel in poetry with the effort of trying to write a “long poem.”) In one of your recent newsletters you write: “Prepping panels is an activity I do when I don’t know what I am going to paint, but also want to do studio work, it keeps me engaged in my practice and feeling like a warm up. I can't say my ideas are born while doing this, but it feels like mis en place for painting.” What does the larger scale afford you?

MD: I think moving from what some might consider large-scale miniature painting to smaller canvases has allowed longer engagement in the work. But I have noticed I have found a sweet spot of canvases in the size of fifteen to twenty inches being the best place for me right now.

SA: As a poet who writes using memory and moments that are semi-autobiographical, I appreciate your paintings and their ability to capture and distill moments from your own (childhood) memories. Could you speak to how you select those moments? And, how do you develop the framing of the moment?

MD: This will sound ridiculous, but the moments come to me, I don’t control them at all. Sometimes I have a thought “I'll paint all the birthday cakes I’ve ever had!” Then I remember like ten of them and that’s the series, randomly selected, not rigorously documented…which I sometimes wish was the case, but that’s not me.

The “framing of the moment” is just how the image sits in my mind. I think of it this way: if I am painting a 3D world on a 2D canvas, it’s going to look bizarre. I think if I had been more interested in things like one- and two-point perspectives, my paintings would look more correct, but the way they come out is how they sit in my mind. I am wandering through the memory, not a static image. This way of making work makes it far more fun to me.

SA: What a lovely concept: “I am wandering through the memory, not a static image.” As a poet, the “image” in a poem can have a lot of weight and be sometimes the center pull of how the poem is organized. I am interested in memory as a creative impulse, a compulsion, a strategy. How do you know when you’ve “exhausted” the memory?

MD: It honestly feels dead to me, I just intuitively know. I can feel my disinterest, and if I try to paint it, the marks to me look forced or uncared for.

SA: When I think of a “Mollie Douthit” painting, I think of thick layers of paint, a subdued earth-tone palette with yellow as a grounding color, all rendering the domestic quotidian life with care and attention to detail. (Yellow is an important color for me!) I know if I entered a room of paintings, I could pick out yours immediately. Your work has a signature style that is uniquely yours. (As a parallel, it is often said that the poems by Carl Phillips are distinguishable from a mile away due to his use of syntax, themes, and phrasing.) I think this speaks to the maker’s sense of self as an artist, a confidence in your own sense of “mark making” and building your canvas’s layers. Do you feel like you have a solid sense of self, as a painter? How have you developed that sense?

MD: YES to YELLOW. I think when you read your yellow poem, I felt kinship with you, even though we had only just met. In reference to if I have a solid sense of myself as a painter, I know my content: my life. How I go about it visually might change, but I also feel good about how I have evolved. Each development in my painting came out of things that weren't working out. I saw that they could be explored more, so now change makes me excited rather than afraid.

To develop a sense of self, I look to other painters, and then I look away for some time. For me, taking a break from looking at other peoples’ paintings is incredibly helpful. I did some teaching for a while and found it was too difficult for me to be around students’ work. I’m so easily influenced or I can get in my head that I'm not doing it “my way.” It was far more beneficial for me to substitute teach at a high school than teach drawing at a college.

SA: As a longtime subscriber to your newsletter, I have enjoyed following along with your creative practice and career. Also, I enjoy your recommendations from recipes to TV shows and books. Your newsletter usually features a painting of yours with a “backstory” behind the painting. Do you think of your paintings as stories or as telling an ongoing (fragmented frame by frame) story? What is your relationship to narrative and storytelling in visual art?

MD: I once heard that we don’t remember things unless we have an emotional response to them, creating a memory. So, in that sense I would always have a memory attached to the paintings I make because they are my life story. Knowing that fact kind of simplified things for me. I didn’t worry about “is this the right thing to paint?!” etc. I just went with what came to me and often something similar would follow, such as the paintings I made of my grandparents’ lake home.

SA: Pain is distracting. It impedes the mind and inhibits activities of daily life. Thanks so much for sharing some of your experiences with chronic pain through your newsletter. In a recent one you write, “Like an old car being revved up again, I want to believe my body is restarting, ready to dive back into being Mollie, the same person yet now changed for the better.” If you have changed for the better, has the work also changed during this time? As an adjacent (annoying?) question, do you think that suffering is necessary to create art?

MD: Thank you for the additional time to work through this question! It is excellent, and in a way I am glad this is part of our interview as this experience is a huge stitch in my life story, so of course I want to pull the thread through and be in the next stitch.

I think the changes to my work might not be directly translated into how I paint, what I paint, but rather I have a greater appreciation for the capacity to paint. I am so grateful to be in a place where the pain is now manageable, and evidential hope that things are getting better.

In the past when I have heard of people suffering from chronic pain, I have typically, and wrongly, assumed it was a low-level pain, or not excruciating. And flare-ups occur when the pain goes outside of what a person experiences on a daily basis. For many months, my chronic pain was excruciating. I couldn’t paint. I could barely cope with living, doing daily tasks, let alone things I once enjoyed. The kind of focus that painting takes (or any creative activity) only allows the pain to become louder—as the engagement of painting for me is really becoming still and quietly working. I never thought something could take painting away. I managed to not completely quit, but between trying medications, traveling for procedures to several countries, and dealing with my own immigration issues, painting took a backseat, and that breaks my heart.

Regarding suffering, I think as humans we all experience good times and horrific times. Some might get more bad times than others, and some might have more extreme cases. My pain has been extreme, but early on I had some life-threatening things ruled out, so in many ways I have not experienced something horrific. I absolutely do not think suffering is necessary. I think it is crucial to my work that I see the joyful moments I have experienced during such a trying time. I believe my work often holds a bittersweet quality, but the paintings are nearly always about the good things in my life.

In short, no. We will all have trials in our life, but it is not critical to make art, and maybe that’s the optimist in me coming out.

SA: I’m having trouble writing new poems right now…what keeps you motivated to return to the canvas?

MD: The best advice I have ever been given was by my friend Martin. I had emailed him about how I was anxious and didn’t feel an urge to paint. A few weeks later I received a post from him, a book on Gwen John, a turn-of-the-century painter I am deeply connected to. In it there was a note: “Now is the time to read, see, enjoy all the other aspects of being a painter, it will come back, so until it does dive into all the other things that support the work.” Suddenly I didn’t have guilt about watching documentaries, reading books, or seeing other peoples’ work.

I also am lucky as a painter, I can do physical labor (prep canvases, take paint inventory, etc.), things I suppose you as a writer cannot do. However, I do harbor a lot of jealousy for the fact that your work can so easily come with you. Do you still hang your writing on the wall? I think I recall you doing that, so maybe I’m presumptuous in this statement.

SA: Yes, I have poems-in-progress on the wall, and will also post a series on the wall to engage with order and to try to sequence.

MD: This brings me joy, reminds me how writers can be visual and painters can be writers in our own way.

SA: What do the words “risk taking” or “ambition” mean to you as a painter?

MD: I think there is healthy ambition and risk, and that is choosing to pursue a creative life, with all the hits and successes. I am an ambitious painter in that this is what I have chosen to do, so I want to be a damn good one, and I also want to respect that the paintings deserve a happy, healthy life so I let them go.

SA: Do you ever get “into the flow” when you are painting? I never really experience this in my writing practice. However, I do think that, sometimes, when I’m focused and paying attention to the poem, time slows down and I lose track of time. But it’s not necessarily a “flow state” per se. If this does happen for you, how do you recreate this feeling and state of making? Or how do you set up the conditions so you can reliably access this state?

MD: I make my painting space cozy. I put on a podcast or I put on some music, I make sure my space is warm. I don’t get into flow either. And time works the opposite for me. I think three hours passed and it was only fifteen minutes. One thing I do notice is that my body becomes relaxed. Peter Schjeldahl, who was an art critic for the New Yorker, wrote a piece called “Notes on Beauty”; it was how he felt when looking at a beautiful piece of work. His description was perfect, something along the lines of “how one feels after swimming” and perfectly summarizes how it feels when I am in a state of ease with my work—a gentleness comes over me.