Joe Doyle, born in New York, studied art at San Francisco State and received his Master’s of Art in 1971. He gained national attention for his role in the mid-1970s West Coast Illusionist Movement distinguished by flat, geometric forms applied in a trompe l’oeil manner of painting.
By the 1980s, Joe began integrating digital elements to his paintings. 3D modeling software enabled a shift in his artistic process, as he explored the formal and theoretical concerns of painting through computational technology.
Professor Doyle is one of the founders of the Multimedia Arts Department at Berkeley City College. His work has been shown at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, and the Yozo Ueda Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.
He was an inspiring leader, teacher, and the founder of Berkeley City College's Multimedia Arts Department. He was not only a teacher for many generations of students at BCC, but also a teacher of those who are now teachers at BCC. Through his participation in innumerable shared-governance committees, he was a model for many young instructors who became, themselves, key leaders.
Joe was brilliant at Peralta politics and an important player in the BCC de-annexation movement which resulted in the acquisition of our new building on Center Street. One such example, was when he threatened to quit unless BCC hired Lee Marrs full time and run the department and after succeeding in bringing her on board swindled her into becoming department chair for Multimedia Arts.
He considered Berkeley City College faculty and staff as his family. Over many years created classes to help artists learn skills to use in this modern world. Students were able to gain employment and support themselves because of skills learned in his classes. He pioneered setting up noncredit courses for the digital imaging department providing a valuable resource to the community at large.
Joe never stopped working and growing as an artist. He felt art was an element of central importance for an individuals self expression and their personal voice. Below is an expert from his website
joedoyle.net discussing his studio practice and influence on the art world at-large.
In the seventies and eighties I helped establish Abstract Illusionism, one of the earliest examples of Post-modernism, working with tromp l’oeil techniques and the history of abstraction from geometric to action painting. I explored the relationship between formal and illusory elements in painting, challenging the dominance of the flat picture plane, which was ‘de rigueur’ for the abstract expressionists.
During the nineties I dropped illusion from the equation and concentrated on formal abstraction. Focusing on (real) surface textures and process painting, I was concerned with the sensual experience of an elegantly painted surface at an intimate
scale.
Since 2000 I have been working with advanced computer generated imaging techniques, synthesizing my previous painting experience into a new medium that offers greater possibilities for image making and personal expression. As I attempt to define contemporary aesthetics, tromp l’oeil space has reentered my work as illusionary textures, 3D modeling, and perspective, although not as confrontational as in my previous abstract illusionist paintings. I have also appropriated those works of art from the past, which have formed a great deal of my personal memory in order to contextualize our contemporary experience.
“Finally, as an artist my work (life) has been an attempt to reconcile the transcendental values of the 19th century with the existential realities of the 20th, and to create an authentic self. One with “a personal history that would correct and replace the bankrupt history of public events.” Leo Brady, From Chivalry to Terrorism