Biography

Few contemporary painters rival James Doolin’s ability to transform the gritty aspects of city life into enchanting visions of urban grandeur. For more than thirty years, Doolin painted hauntingly beautiful images of Los Angeles that rank among the city’s most compelling iconography. Crafted with a keen eye for observation and masterful technical skill, Doolin’s magnificent depictions of the sprawling Los Angeles basin have established him as one of the foremost urban scene painters of the late 20th century.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, Doolin’s family moved to suburban Pennsylvania when he was seven years old. The monotonous environment he endured there for the next 11 years—assuaged only by his family’s annual summer visits to rural, northern Vermont and an enlightening cross-country trip to the Rocky Mountains—fueled his desire to travel and cemented his love for landscape.1 Doolin studied at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, completing his degree in 1954, and was drafted into the army the following year. During his deployment in Heidelberg, Germany, he took every opportunity to travel, and upon his return to the United States in 1957, he settled in New York. For the next four years, Doolin divided his time between his creative pursuits and his work as a commercial illustrator. After a year-long sojourn on the Greek island of Rhodes, where he devoted himself fully to painting and travel, he returned to New York and began a series of paintings informed by the abstract visual qualities of his Greenwich Village neighborhood. He called these flat, boldly colored geometric paintings Artificial Landscapes.

Doolin moved to Southern California in 1967 to pursue his M.F.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles, and after receiving his degree in 1971, was hired as a lecturer in painting. For a time, he continued to paint abstractly, and while his work received favorable attention from the UCLA painting faculty, most notably Richard Diebenkorn and James Weeks, it was never shown in Los Angeles. He eventually found abstraction too limiting, and his interest in the complexity of illusion led him to create hundreds of paintings based on his direct observations of landscapes, still lifes, figures, and portraits.

In 1973, Doolin began work on his next major project: Shopping Mall, which depicts a busy urban intersection in Santa Monica, California. For more than four years, Doolin conducted extensive research, completed dozens of drawings and painted studies, and undertook countless hours of thorough observations from the ground, neighboring rooftops, and the air. He even chartered a helicopter to fly over the intersection to photograph the light at exactly 4:36 p.m. on a spring afternoon in 1974. The streets in Doolin’s painting are filled with cars and people going about their daily routines. His bird’s-eye view reveals children clutching balloons and spinning cartwheels in the plaza, while adults walk their dogs and browse newspaper racks. Alice in Wonderland plays at the Criterion Theatre and business is brisk at neighborhood shops such as the Wig Factory, Karl’s Shoes, and Claridge Jewelers.

While planning the composition, Doolin looked for inspiration in two of his favorite Renaissance painters, Giovanni Bellini and Peter Brueghel the Elder. Bellini’s painting Saint Francis in the Desert (ca. 1480) shares Doolin’s concern for scaled accuracy and highly detailed renderings, and centers Saint Francis within an all-enveloping landscape. Likewise, Brueghel’s painting Children’s Games (Kinderspiele) (1560) portrays a bustling village square and includes multiple mininarratives within a highly organized space.
In 1977, Doolin’s Shopping Mall painting, along with its preparatory sketches, drawings, photographs, and oil studies were displayed in the exhibition Shopping Mall: The Anatomy of a Painting at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery at Barnsdall Park. The following year, the painting and its ephemera traveled to venues in seven Australian cities. After completing the all-encompassing project, Doolin received financial support from simultaneous Guggenheim and NEA grants, enabling him to leave his teaching position at UCLA and move to a remote area of the Mojave Desert, where he worked on a series of desert landscapes.

After three productive years in the desert, Doolin returned to Los Angeles, exhibited his desert paintings, and settled into a studio loft in a semi-industrial area of downtown L.A., from which he had a grand view of City Hall and the urban nightlife. His subsequent work represented the bare bones of the city, including its massive skeleton and endless arteries of concrete in the form of freeways, bridges, rivers, and streets. Most all of his work from this point forward is characterized by a haunting emptiness and a moody, surreal light. As art critic Sheila Farr has noted, “Doolin paints an eerie place that makes the stark loneliness of [Edward] Hopper’s scenes look innocent.”2 Indeed, the artist often seduces us into his mysterious urban narratives and then leaves us alone to unearth their meanings.

Psychic (1998) epitomizes Doolin’s tendency to imbue Southern California’s most ordinary sites with an enigmatic sense of grandeur. Here, a blank commercial billboard—a ubiquitous symbol of L.A.’s massive freeway system—towers above a deserted strip of small businesses. The empty sign seems to await a corporate advertising slogan or the screening of a Hollywood film. Beneath the monumental structure, and bathed in the light of a burning red sunset, the glowing neon sign of a psychic offers to summon mystic forces on our behalf. Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight noted that “the unseen promises of the commercial billboard become a poignant counterpoint to the psychic secrets held in the future and being advertised below.”3

According to Doolin, all of his paintings are “the result of a miraculous partnership between the conscious and unconscious, between the rational and irrational. No matter how compulsively I work to control everything in the paintings, what comes out is very much outside my conscious control.”4 Doolin’s Psychic, like the best of L.A. film noir, does not offer a straightforward narrative. Rather, its mysteries toy with our consciousness, inviting us to seek explanations that might only exist in the vast and irrational landscape of the unknown. —A.W.

1. Patricia Hickson, “James Doolin’s Illusionistic Vision,” Urban Invasion (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 2001), 9–10.
2. Sheila Farr, “A Breath of Fresh Air from L.A.,” Seattle Union Record, 9 December 2000.
3. Christopher Knight, “Capturing the Transience of ‘Some Los Angeles Icons,’” Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2000.
4. James Doolin, quoted in … [need reference]

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


James Doolin was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1932. In 1971, he received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Doolin’s work has been shown extensively in both the United States and Australia at institutions including the University Art Museum, Melbourne, Australia, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, the De Young Museum, the Laguna Art Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art. His work is held in the collections of the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; the Newcastle Art Museum, New South Wales, Australia; the Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii; and the Long Beach Museum of Art, among others.  He received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1980, three grants from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1981, 1985, and 1991, and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department Grant in 1997. This will be the first work by Doolin to enter SJMA’s collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2002)

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