Our artist for this Studio Sunday is Douglas Coupland, an artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Despite the bright, clean colours present in many of his artworks, Coupland’s studio space is fairly simple, less a fancy artist’s loft than a humble basement studio. It is, however, spacious, and well equipped for working in a wide variety of materials, from paint, to sculpture to Lego, as seen above. The visual excitement in Couplands studio definitely comes from his artworks, instead of the room itself.

Douglas Coupland is a graduate of Vancouver’s Emily Carr University, where he studied sculpture. He later went to study in Japan and worked as a designer there, before returning to Vancouver where he immediately got a job as a writer. Discovering his love of writing, Coupland put his artistic career on hold for a decade, before reviving it in the early 2000’s. His work today is influenced by pop-art and the media, and has a certain odd sense of humour to it that is also present in much of his fiction writing. His work is often very colourful, utilizing innovative materials and inviting audience influence or participation – for example, his Gum Head sculpture encourages viewers to stick chewing gum directly onto the work, something that is comically against the norms of social behavior in the gallery space.

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