Doug Whitfield was born in 1945 in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up in a family full of artists and began to realize as a youngster that his world was art and art was his world. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Mohawk Valley Community College, Rochester Institute of Technology and Syracuse University. He received his AAS in Design in 1965 and BFA in Painting in 1968 at RIT. He earned Master Teacher Certification, Integrative Learning System in 1999 from Syracuse University. Whitfield's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions throughout the United States, and in Europe and Asia. His work has been included in numerous two person and group shows throughout the country. He has received countless awards and honors for his paintings. Whitfield's studio and home are in upstate New York at Cedar Lake.“My compositions are dreamlike; they blur myth, history and fantasy together. My characters gesture to you dramatically and strike romantic poses on the stage of my fantastic theater. They are cognizant of you, just as you are of them. In my ambiguous dramas, the beautiful and grotesque seem but two sides of the same coin. The point of these juxtapositions other than for your delight, is to engage the power of your imagination to reconcile the ambiguity. My performers beg you to step onto their stage and play along with them in my fantastic theater. My studio is in rural upstate New York. Oil paint on stretched canvas is my medium and people are my subject. I approach each composition by imagining the emotional response to the painting I wish the viewer will have. Then I conceive a complex arrangement of characters and clues the viewer will use to figure out a story and how they (the viewer) fit into the drama on my stage. I have a strong foundation in drawing and classical painting, which underly my compositions. I love the way Leonardo da Vinci used arrows, numbers, and assorted drafting notations to clarify his classical drawings. I work on several paintings concurrently. As in stage productions, I have characters I use over and over who play different roles. Concurrent compositions often share the same characters, palette and themes.Collectors around the world own my paintings. Many painting awards and honors have been delivered to me, but these are not the reason I paint, and are no measure of the significance of my work. Instead, the most meaningful measure of my work's value is the ever-growing intense interaction that my patrons develop with my paintings.”