A Tue., Nov. 9 proclamation issued by Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and the Berkeley City Council recognized Berkeley City College’s Digital Arts Club (DAC) for its talent, creativity, and its many years of artistic contributions to Bay Area galleries and exhibits.

The club, whose members include multimedia arts students and faculty members, has served as a leader in promoting area arts. The group has worked to greatly improve community awareness and appreciation digital arts. It also provides a valuable educational resource for those who wish to gain skills in multimedia and digital arts production. Instructor Joe Doyle is DAC adviser.

DAC exhibit themes center around motion graphics, video, web art, animation, sound design, and other related disciplines . The group displays art in both private galleries and educational venues.

The city’s proclamation, in honor of BCC’s Nov. 19-20 Fall Arts Festival, commended the group’s work and noted, in part, that: “ . . . . Faculty members and students from the Multimedia Arts Department of Berkeley City College utilize their excellent facilities to offer comprehensive courses in multimedia arts. Incorporating the latest hardware and software these lessons have been an affordable and invaluable resource that benefits community members from all over the Bay Area. . . .”

SFMOMA Artists Gallery at Fort Mason: Marta Thoma, Kim Thoman, Joe Doyle.

Link to Gallery Site

Comment by AB: Roller coaster sculptures by Marta Thoma consist of multicolored bottles "strung" onto bent metal rods. Kim Thoman creates a pastel painting, then takes a detail of that painting and digitally morphs its form, then incorporates that form into a new painting, and so on and so forth. You might call her modus an unfolding evolutionary progression. Lastly but certainly not leastly, we have Joe Doyle's amusing warp on composite photography with images that include a hydrogen bomb in sitting in the middle of a small room, and a fur coated cup and saucer. For those of you scoring at home, Kim Thoman and Marta Thoma are sisters.

Several members of the Peralta Federation of Teachers donned orange T-shirts Sept. 27 and marched from PFT headquarters across 8th Street to the Peralta Board of Trustees meeting where faculty members protested the trustees’ approval of new administrative positions at a time of alleged austerity.

At the Sept. 27 Peralta Board of Trustees meeting, Berkeley City College Multimedia Arts Instructor Joe Doyle sat waiting before rising to ask the board if they had tried to register for classes using Peralta’s online system, Passport. He then strongly suggested they try it. Issues with Passport have made it difficult for many students to register, contributing to under enrollment.

In their latest collaboration, R&D, artist Diane Rosenblum and painter Joe Doyle (R&D), rely on Cinema 4D technology and photography techniques to create large-scale artworks that push the aesthetics of painting and photography into exciting new territory.

R&D’s most recent exhibition entitled, “New Formalism in Painting and Photography,” comprises a monumental photo installation and a series of organic abstract paintings, and is currently on view at the Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art, in Moraga, California. (Read press release here.)

A centerpiece of the exhibition, the 5 x 70 foot photographic installation of Idaho artist Judith Kindler in her home and studio, explores concepts of space and time. The image is based on photographs initially taken and then collaged into a scroll-like mural by Rosenblum that are then manipulated digitally by Doyle in Cinema 4D to reconstruct the picture plane. It stretches along all four walls of one of the two gallery spaces that comprise this show. The other is filled with paintings made from Rosenblum’s vector and photographic files, which are then manipulated in Cinema 4D by Doyle.

“Beyond being big, fresh and fun, our new paintings and photographs open conversations about photography and tech, artists and invention, and new ways of seeing,” says Rosenblum. “We play with time in our photographs and mess with space”.  Doyle adds, “We throw off 100 years of dogma that states fine art had to be flat.”

Here we speak to Rosenblum and Doyle about the influence of Cinema 4D on their work and tips for aspiring visual storytellers.


Maxon: The collection of large-scale images in this exhibition makes a stunning visceral impact. Tell us about this recent work.

Rosenblum: This show contains one 70-foot long photograph that stretches around the four walls of a gallery. The monumental piece “Judith Kindler in the Studio” shows the Idaho artist, her work, and her living space.  It tells the story of a visit to Judith Kindler’s studio, and gives viewers a strong sense of what it is like to be with her in her space. The work pushes on the boundaries of photography, dealing with non-sequential time and also expanding the image forwards and back into space through Cinema 4D. The software reiterates our underlying position that the computer has permanently altered the way we see and understand the world.

Doyle: What you’re seeing is 70 years of combined art experience between Diane and myself enhanced by digital technology. We use Cinema 4D as part of the creative process. This is not a postproduction deal.


Maxon: What does the collaboration process look like?

Rosenblum: Our photographic works start with high resolution files from my shoots in artists studios. I develop them in Photoshop and sometimes collage them into multi-image sequences.  Our abstract paintings mostly begin with one of my vector files, but sometimes come from my photographs or Joe’s files.

Doyle: After preproduction Diane passes along the files and I drop them into Cinema 4D and create a texture map and put it on a 3D object. I work on the images and then we have conversations about what we like and don’t like. In the end the piece is a collaboration between two aesthetic senses.

We used Cinema 4D R19 on this project relying on the wonderful lighting and materials effects and displacement and distortion features to achieve the graphic qualities of the shadows we were after with great detail, finesse and authenticity.

Rosenblum: The compiling of photographic sequences in our work references pioneer Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic advances in perceiving motion and time. R&D expand upon these, incorporating Cinema 4D to animate a comprehensive non-cyclical image with two realities – the original camera view documenting the artist’s studio, and the composed view shifting the geometric blocks forward and backward from the conventional picture plane.

Maxon: What led to incorporating technology into your work?

Doyle:  As a painter trained in traditional arts, I’ve always been concerned about surfaces and contours of surfaces, how they look under light and dark. When I first created the multimedia department at Berkeley City College in 1998 I could see that there was this thing called 3D animation on the horizon. I heard about Cinema 4D and when I saw what it could do it just blew my mind as it gives artists a way of seeing into the diffuse texture of surfaces which is what gives us an idea of what the actual objects are. I was fascinated with the aesthetics of the program and what I could learn about spatial relationships and diffused light.

Speed is incredibly important in the creative process because it’s often just a flicker across your mind and you want to get on it before you lose it. Cinema 4D allows me to conceptualize at light speed. I can change and rotate models, change the camera view, texture, adjust the lighting and coloring, and more, until I get what I want very quickly.


Maxon: As head of the Digital Media Arts Center at Berkeley City College, what tips can you give students today who want to incorporate 3D into their work?

Doyle: The college is affiliated with Maxon’s educational license program so we can keep up-to-date teaching the latest version of Cinema 4D to the next generation of artists. What I tell my students is look around you – look at the ads, look at the movies. 3D is going to eat you alive if you don’t know how to do it. Just forget it and look for a different occupation. But if you’re a graphic or web artist or video person and you think you’ll want to work in a visual field that’s going to be presented to people, you have to know 3D, without a doubt.


Maxon: What’s next for R&D?

Doyle: Diane and I are not sure what we will be doing next, but it’s likely we will create similar work that is abstract in nature, and Cinema 4D will play a principal role.

 
R&D Image Information:
Additional R&D imagery is available for viewing, as follows:
dianerosenblum.com/r-and-d-photography/
dianerosenblum.com/r-and-d-stripe-painting/

R&D - the collaborative team of Diane Rosenblum and Joe Doyle, began work five years ago with a series of prints about the seduction of military materials.  Last summer they began a new project looking at the architectural theory of Parametricism through painting, melding hard edge abstraction with 3D computer modeling. This new work, still in an exploratory phase, pushes the aesthetics of painting into new territory, reflecting a culture increasingly permeated with and reliant upon computers and a digital mindset.

Link to Gallery Website

We were heading to the Petaluma Art Center which is in the restored Petaluma train station on Lakeville Street.  We went to see the show “Digital Mixed Media, Bay Area Artists take Digital Photography to a New Level”. What a Wowzer of a show!  The Invitational part of the show was curated by Joe McDonald of the Digital Grange in Petaluma, the Juried part by Joe Doyle, of the Multimedia Department at Berkeley City College.

A combination of Diane’s digital sky photography and Joe’s depiction of weapons produced in a 3D program, this work is a statement decrying the proliferation of the tools of war and their destabilizing effect on world security, national economies, the environment, world hunger, education, and more.

-- Jan Dove [ Personal Website Blog]

MA Mutual Art --  Website Gallery

Joe Doyle is an American Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1941. Their work was featured in exhibitions at the SFMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary's College.  Joe Doyle's work has been offered at auction multiple times.

Abstract illusionism, a name coined by art historian and critic Barbara Rose in 1967. [1] Louis K. Meisel independently coined the term to define an artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the mid-1970s.

History[edit]The works were generally derivative of expressionistic, and hard-edge abstract painting styles, with the added elements of perspective, artificial light sources, and simulated cast shadows to achieve the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Abstract illusionism differed from traditional trompe-l'œil (fool the eye) art in that the pictorial space seemed to project in front of, or away from, the canvas surface, as opposed to receding into the picture plane as in traditional painting. Primarily, though, these were abstract paintings, as opposed to the realism of trompe l'oeil. By the early 1980s, many of the visual devices that originated in Abstract Illusionism were appropriated into the commercial world and served a wide variety of applications in graphic design, fabric design and the unlikely decoration of recreational vehicles. This proliferation of commercialism in Abstract Illusionist imagery eventually led to the disintegration of the original artistic movement, as a number of the original artists abandoned working in the style. Pre-1970 forerunners and practitioners of the style include Ronald Davis, Allan D'Arcangelo, and Al Held.

Artists associated with the 1970s Abstract Illusionism movement, as documented through museum exhibitions and art literature, include James Havard, Jack Lembeck, Joe Doyle (artist), Tony King, Jack Reilly, George D. Green, and Michael B. Gallagher. The first major museum exhibitions to survey Abstract Illusionism were "Abstract Illusionism," Paul Mellon Arts Center, Wallingford, CT, 1977; "Seven New York Artists (Abstract Illusionism)", Sewall Art Gallery, Rice University, Houston, TX, 1977; "Breaking the Picture Plane," Tomasulo Gallery, Union College, Cranford, NJ; and "The Reality of Illusion", curated by Donald Brewer of the University of Southern California, which originated in 1979 at the Denver Art Museum and traveled to the Oakland Museum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, the University of Southern California, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. A number of exhibitions were organized and assembled by the leading dealer of the genre, Louis K. Meisel who presented important artists in solo and group exhibitions throughout the seventies at 141 Prince Street in SoHo.

In 1972 the English critic Bryan Robertson also used the term “Abstract Illusionism” to characterize sculptures by Kenneth Draper, Nigel Hall and William Tucker and paintings by Paul Huxley and Bridget Riley.[2]

-- From Wikipedia

Doyle established himself as a painter during the movement toward new abstraction in San Francisco in the mid-seventies. Stylistically his work evolved from photo-realist renderings of aircraft which exaggerated differences in focus of background and foreground".[1] By 1975 his imagery shifted to arrangements of flat, geometric forms and tubular squiggles in a trompe l'oeil manner that created the illusion of a multi-layered, three dimensional space. By the late 1970s Doyle, along with James Havard, Jack Reilly, George D. Green, and others, had attained national prominence working this style now referred to as Abstract Illusionism. Doyle and others were included in 'Reality of Illusion' a large touring exhibition of primarily American illusionist artists organized by the University of Southern California and The Denver Art Museum.[2]

According to an interview by Mark Levy in the January/February, 1982 issue of Art Voices,[3] Doyle began his artistic career in the Air Force, where Doyle says he was relieved of difficult assignments and encouraged to paint by a sergeant who appreciated his realistic landscape paintings. When he began painting abstractly, however, the sergeant relegated him to K.P. duty. Following the Air Force Doyle enrolled at San Francisco State College receiving his M.A. in 1971. From 1971 to 1975 he was a photo-realist transferring images from photographs using airbrush techniques on canvas, occasionally adding political satire into the subject matter, as in "Ice House (1971).

Doyle is currently an instructor and co-chair of the Digital Arts Department at Berkeley City College. In 2010 then Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and the Berkeley City Council recognized Doyle and the Berkeley City College’s Digital Arts Club (DAC) for "its talent, creativity, and its many years of artistic contributions to Bay Area galleries and exhibits.".[4] His most recent work delves into the realm of both 3-D realism and 3-D non-objective abstraction. In 2017 he released a new series titled "New Abstracts" employing the use of 3-D modeling and color fields to create an illusion of 3-dimensional space.

-- From Wikipedia