Douglas Bloch paints the things you forgot you remembered — Saturday morning cartoons, junk-food logos, the jingle that still lives rent-free in your head decades later. He came by this material the hard way: a suburban '70s kid raised on too much TV and too little supervision, who stumbled into Seattle's '80s punk scene just as the suburban marriages and the picture-perfect vision behind them were quietly imploding. The scene gave him his people — artists, musicians, delinquents, and outcasts — and launched him like a bottle rocket.

The plan, as far as there was one, was to burn bright and flame out in a blaze of glory. He got partway there — landed a solo show his first semester of art school, then torched it and dropped out before it happened. He got sober eventually and didn't pick up a paintbrush again for more than thirty years — until the pandemic hit.

He now lives in Alameda, a small town in the SF Bay Area, and creates paintings that trace the full arc of that specific, strange American life — from the suburbs to the scene that saved him, and back to the suburbs. Since starting back up, he's produced nearly four dozen works and built a growing exhibition record.

He is self-taught. He paints in acrylic, gouache, ink, and pencil on canvas, paper, wood, and other surfaces, but his main medium is nostalgia.