In Memory of Chris Doyle
1959-2025
My friend Chris Doyle died yesterday, very suddenly. The shock of it has yet to abate; I can’t accept it, can’t accept the truth, or meaning, or even all the sadness, of the loss. Not the best moment, then, to try to write about the guy with any kind of perspective; I guess I’ll just have to do without.
Chris was artist in the fullness of the word: by nature, by training and habit, by profession; in his eyes, ears, and hands, and in the mind that intermediated among them. He noticed things you missed and captured them, entertained ideas that had escaped you and put them into play, and then when you took in one of his undefinable pieces—words like “multimedia” and “interdisciplinary” are so dreary—you felt that it was showing you something you had always known, or feared, or wished for.
He had a restless, unstoppable gift, uncontainable by any medium or style. He began his career as an architect, envisioning buildings, and finished by envisioning worlds. He worked in paint, steel, wood, rock, paper, film, pixels and photons; with brush, pencil, iPhone, hammer, fire, Illustrator. He was a sculptor, an animator, a maker of installations and environments. His work scaled up to the size of tall buildings, of Times Square, and nestled comfortably on a mantelpiece in a modest Berkeley living room. He had a rock-solid, old-school talent as a draftsman and great technical skill with paint, especially watercolor, enough to have made a career for himself in any pre-Modernist moment or milieu, but—no, and—he took delight in and embraced the application of digital technologies to his practice of art. As an animator he deployed both the ancient painstaking techniques of cel-by-cel and stop-motion, and the latest versions of Flash and then AfterEffects.
Last spring, I was among the many astonished visitors to the Vuitton Foundation’s big Hockney retrospective, marveling at the seemingly unbounded and manifold gift on display across genres and media, at play with schools of art and with the beauty of the visible world but committed to engaging with its darkness and decay. Chris had that kind of limitless, protean gift, and I thought of him often, that day, as I followed the crowd around the Vuitton. I guess I’m glad, in hindsight, that I wasn’t obliged then, as I am now, to think that unlike David Hockney, Chris lacked only the gift of time.
Chris Doyle worked incredibly, often furiously hard—though it was a cool, steady-burning fury—and that combination of talent and sweat paid off, both creatively and professionally: prizes, grants, prestigious and highly-visible commissions, all that. Endearingly none of those things ever appeared to delude or reassure him that his artistic goals had been achieved, that his assigned task—his reason for being here, the point of him—had been accomplished.
I’m telling you, the guy’s work was really something. Don’t take my word for it:
That last piece returns me, and always will return me, however long or short my own remaining time may be, to the artist who was my friend, the friend of my wife and all four of our children. A gallerist described it, with perfect accuracy, thus:
…Reminiscent of his 2012 series of watercolors “The Savage State” in which he reinterprets Thomas Cole’s “The Course of Empire” (1833-1836), illustrating the forest floor and the trees overhead through fractured geometry. This depiction of the angelic child as “the prophet” with the group of children listening intently remarks upon the reality that the next generation must confront what the previous one has overlooked, especially when considering humans’ relationship with the earth.
To me, however, The Prophet is something more intimate and infinitely poignant, because that is my angelic child, the younger of my two daughters, and her little brother sits among those listening children, their playmates then, and those fractured trees are the woods by our house in the little corner of Downeast Maine where we all met Chris, and he became our family’s friend. And that was how it was, then, for those kids and for all of us, that afternoon, irrespective of and unburdened by knowledge of the fate, whether foreseen or unforeseeable, of a sunny day in August, of summertime, of childhood, of the earth.
Because as with all great artists and great-hearted people, Chris’s gifts were given to the rest of us, through him. He had turned his back on the practice of architecture decades earlier—repudiated it, even. But when Ayelet and I needed a pair of small, interlinked studios, separated from that boisterous and often crowded house, Chris “came out of retirement,” at his own initiative—we would never have dared or even thought to ask—to design a perfect pair of little architectural gems.
But it was in the exercise of another of his manifold gifts that Chris Doyle the artist and Chris Doyle the friend most nearly coincided, and that was—of course—his gift for paying attention.
Chris could talk—he was funny, quick-witted, expressive, opinionated, dishy, well-informed—but I was always struck by what a natural and avid listener he was. He was an elite noticer, of people and their contexts—otherwise known as “the world.” He noticed, for example, how a young, moderately angelic friend of his—acting on the model of certain beloved teachers and camp counselors— liked to gather other kids into a circle, stand up and, eyes shining, tell ghost stories, or Greek myths. Chris noticed you.
But it’s not quite as simple as saying that he was “a good listener” or (perhaps even more importantly and rarely) a good rememberer of things you had told him, whether the last time you met, or ten years before. Though he was quick-witted and funny, and even known, now and then, to verge on the acerbic, and though he was prepared when appropriate to take nothing too seriously, least of all himself; when you had his attention—when he was there with you, noticing and listening and remembering—he took you seriously. Even if you were just a little kid.1
In the course of doing his work and of being our friend, Chris became—by the way, as it were, with an off-handed inevitability—an occasional chronicler of our children’s childhood and youth, and of the life of our whole family, as they were in those summers, in that place. He gave us that gift, and we will treasure it, and his memory, with all the love, and the seriousness, and the gratitude that the gift of true, human attention demands.
When I agreed, against every inclination but with all my heart, to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors of what was still known, in that remote era, as the MacDowell Colony, Chris, himself a MacDowell Fellow, was the first person to take me seriously in that (to me, still) unlikely role. He took me far more seriously than I took myself, in fact—because he had noticed something about me that it would take me a couple of years to recognize myself—and I can say honestly and accurately that I spent my entire, subsequent ten-tear tenure trying to live up to and deserve that seriousness, the enchanted gift of his bright, sharp attention.
I worked at Creative Capital many years ago as part of their professional development program. Chris was one of the teachers who led workshops. He was dishy and cool and yes, took every artist in that room - whether there to learn about taxes or marketing - seriously. When many of us struggled to call ourselves artists he was matter of fact about it. As a young woman trying to figure out how I was going to make it work in NYC, I was fortunate to have Chris as a model. It’s bittersweet to learn the news from Deer Isle - we love this corner of the world, too.
Thank you Michael, All those tender and beautiful-because-so-fleeting Maine summer days with Chris and Tim are flashing before me reading this. Chris, the Olympic level ex-gymnast happily bouncing on the trampoline with our children. His loving, faintly self-mocking laughter as we talked on and on about art, tinged with wry knowledge of his own boundless ambition to add to the gorgeous imperfections of the world. Irreplaceable.