Doug DeVivo’s magical journey through art

Doug DeVivo’s Blue Door Gallery on Guerneville’s Main Street is as tempting for passers-by as the rabbit hole was for Alice.

They know from the sculpture, the intriguing window displays and the dreamworld of layered, intertwined paper on the walls that it’s going to be a magical journey.

A doorway introduces a back room workshop with an enormous worktable centered mid-room and surrounded by happy visitors on the first Friday of each month when Doug is conducting “let’s all make something” sessions. But generally, the table is all his.

DeVivo, a Jenner resident who says he would move to New Mexico if it had an ocean, uses those sessions to spread the love of street art and to help make the hanging planters he plans to suspend throughout downtown Guerneville.

Once he is alone in the workshop, he returns to his favorite medium - collage.

“I paint with paper, creating depth and shadow from bits of written history, old illustrated technology and slivers of our own personal histories,” said DeVivo, 59. “As you focus, the layers peel away, revealing new, ever changing stories and perspectives.”

He was born and raised in San Jose, studied fine arts at San Jose State University and in 1981, got a scholarship to study Chinese art in Taipei, Taiwan. He intended to stay just two months but ended up immersed in studies for three years.

“The first year, I gratefully found myself learning one on one from a very fine and unique old Mainland Chinese master painter, a traditional craftsman,” he said. In addition to painting, he learned how to make his own scrolls and papers.

“I had always been interested in paper and began adding the papers I collected off the streets of Taiwan into my paintings and scrolls,” DeVivo said. “If I walked into class with a candy wrapper collaged in a traditional painting, my teachers wouldn’t flinch. They’d add brush strokes to enhance it.”

He rented a room at a theological college in the mountains behind Taipei and learned things that have had a profound effect on his life.

“This is where I feel my life and art education really began,” DeVivo said. “I not only learned different ways of painting, craft, Chinese thought, I also learned the importance of time and devotion.”

But the cosmos often unravels in strange ways. “A week after finishing school, my house was flooded and almost all my art and equipment was destroyed,” he said. “It felt like a sign to leave Chinese art behind.”

He moved back to California in 1996, taking with him three important skills: patience, excellence at finding assistants and the ability to teach people about art.

DeVivo spent the 12 years running a design company that required him to commute between the U.S. and China three or four times a year.

While spending time between Rio Nido and Quincy, in the mountains north of Nevada City, he also “started to do collage again, this time outside in nature. What greater place to have a studio than in the outdoors, (with) just a backpack of materials, a mat to sit on and a thermos of tea? I love the solitude, variations in weather, all the variables, nature and paper.

“The way I work is a meditation, with devotion and focus.”

For about five years he has been living in Jenner and is in a relationship with artist Mary Livingston. He shares the Guerneville gallery with her and, on the first Friday of each month, with whoever walks into the Blue Door to participate in a hands-on art project.

DeVivo and Livingston put out a spread with cheesecake, hand-made sushi, champagne and other comfort food, and dozens of folks gather around his work table to make things out of the supplies he has provided.

Hats and tiaras have walked out of the shop, and Popsicle stick architecture has graced the table. Mr. Potato Head night was born out of a sack of russets, with eyes, tinsel, colored paper, glue and scissors within reach.

On Lollipop Flower night, people painted the wooden flowers that will be used in DeVivo’s hanging planters. He plans to enlist citizens to help him make 72 hand-crafted and gaily painted wooden planter pots that will be suspended from Guerneville’s period lampposts. Plaques beneath each planter will bear the names of the people who made them.

The first three hang right outside the Blue Door, awaiting others co-created by eager citizens who didn’t know they were artists.

Blue Door Gallery is located at 16359 Main St., Guerneville, 869-3834, on Facebook at TheBlueDoorGallery.

Contact Stephen D. Gross, River Towns Correspondent, at sdgross@sonic.net.