Harry C. Doolittle was born September 17, 1923 in Chicago. He grew up in Winnetka, a Chicago suburb, and graduated from Northwestern University. Doolittle is a self-taught artist who began painting in 1969 while a copywriter/creative director at one of America’s leading advertising agencies.

Doolittle’s first show, featuring twenty works, was in 1978 in Evansville, Indiana. It completely sold out. Similar successes followed with two shows in 1980 in Harare, Zimbabwe and Johannesburg, South Africa, where Doolittle was creative director for an American-based ad agency.

The colorful mixed-media images that Doolittle creates are rooted in the whimsical, the decorative, and the meditative. An article in Art Spectrum notes that the “symmetry of acrylics, glass, aluminum, and brass lead creates richly-textured scintillating compositions.” According to Doolittle, these paintings can be hung vertically, horizontally, or even upside-down; the abstract shapes and colors maintain their brilliance in any orientation.

What is most unique about Doolittle’s oeuvre is his use of glass. Each colored glass element functions like a mirror that both absorbs and reflects light, thus adding a three-dimensional depth to the artwork. Images that the artist never intended to be in the paintings appear; the face of the viewer, the lights in the room, the surroundings in which the painting hangs...