Down Town by James Doolin, 1985 oil on canvas 83″ x 72″

By Joseph Futtner

Coming from New York where the subway works predictably, if not perfectly, and an automobile is more a liability than a necessity, I have long been intrigued by the concept of an L.A. subway system. That concept is becoming a reality — I think it’s fair to say sooner than most Angelenos would have believed. And as a way to encourage the system’s acceptance and its greater integration within the community, the MTA has begun to hire professional artists to work as core members of each station’s design team.

Hmm. Subways and Art. In New York, maybe. But Los Angeles? The Valley? How will this new equation of mass transit and aesthetics add up? Well, we don’t know yet, and won’t for at least some months. We do, however, now know the names of the two artists participating in the design of the NoHo area stations: James Doolin (North Hollywood Station) and Margaret Garcia (Universal City Station).

Oasis by James Doolin, 1985-86 oil on canvas 90″ x 72″

The selection of Doolin and Garcia is the culmination of a lengthy process. Part of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s “Art for Rail Transit” program, the selection involved several months of activity, including a public hearing, committee selection, the writing of a community profile, and the assembling of an artist review panel consisting of members of the community and art professionals. Last month the panel considered over one hundred seventy artists before making a determination.

This screening resulted in the selection of seven finalists, each to be interviewed by the panel. The panel considered not only the artists’ work, but their experience and their commitment to working on a highly visible public art project. They were interested, too, in the artists’ willingness to work alongside architects, designers, and project administrators.

Jim Berg, editor and publisher of NoHo Magazine was a member of both the committee and the review panel. According to Berg, the artists are expected “to integrate the art into the design,” and not simply to tack up some paintings in a given station. Making judgments about the visual artists can be daunting, so Berg wel-comed the input of the art professionals on the panel. “[Among those considered] were new artists. It was a great experience to listen to [the professionals] descriptions of the work.” Berg further notes that “all the people [on the committee] were enjoyable to work with.”

James Doolin, an established Los Angeles painter who regards the city the primary source of his visual imagery, looks forward to the job of determining, with the architects and planners, the aesthetic “shape” of the North Hollywood Station (Universal City Station artist Margaret Garcia will be profiled next month in NoHo Magazine). According to Doolin, the Station is an artist’s dream project, “appealing to my idealism,” and giving him the chance to “try it out in the real world.”

Born and trained on the East Coast, Doolin has spent most of his sixty years in Southern California -— excepting a three-year stint in Australia during the mid-1960s. The art scene Down Under, while active and enthusiastic, lacked an “edge,” Doolin says. “Their standards just weren’t high enough.” The painter returned to his adopted state of California.

Back stateside, Doolin found the standards not so much higher as restrictive. At the time, he was working on abstract paintings, mostly derived from the landscape, in rigid geometries and a high-keyed palette. The abstract works, according to the artist, had a “looming” and “deliberately mechanical” look which “people either liked or they didn’t.” Tiring of this manner, he began to incorporate recognizable imagery into his paintings. So began a process which, by 1969, led to his rejection of abstraction for an art based in realist illusion. The decision was not without cost. A consequence of this turn-around amounted to an art world apostasy. “I burned a lot of bridges,” the artist confesses. But Doolin the Realist persisted.

Those familiar with Doolin’s large-scale, realist representations of Los Angeles landscapes and lives might say that “the real world” has long been the artist’s preoccupation. The situations the artist depicts are often shown from an oblique or unnatural perspective, providing a view deliberately at odds with the traditional pictorial expectation. As a result, these pictures — of freeways, the crowded shoreline, urban strip malls — seem foreign and dislocated as much as they seem familiar and accessible. They convey a quality of “artificiality” — a word Doolin uses to describe both the region and his painted response to it.

A 1983 painting, 4WD, is an example of Doolin’s juxtaposition of the achingly familiar with an eerie strangeness. The product of his self-imposed exile to the northern Mojave (thanks to a Guggenheim grant), 4WD presents a landscape view from the interior of an off-road vehicle in the desert. The perspective is slanted in a way to suggest that the viewer’s vision, and not the vehicle’s position, is skewed. We look out through the windshield at a vast desert panorama of blue skies and clouds. Inside the cab the scene is not so pacific. The glove compartment is open, its contents rifled and spilling forth. A pistol rests on the passenger seat, menacing and ominous. So what’s going on? The unresolved narrative suggests a sort of threat or its tragic aftermath. Doolin is matter-of-fact in his explanation of the work’s content. The gun, he asserts, is included “as much because it would be blue as (because) it is a weapon.” As for the rest -— the narrative, indeed, existential, implications Doolin says, “I leave it to the viewer to decide.”

Doolin, critical of aspects of both abstract and conceptual art, likewise abjures the “cool” subjects of Photorealism. The quintessential California realists of the seventies, the Photorealists presented a vision of arid icons of Car Culture and the Tract House. Demonstrating a high degree of technical accomplishment — the paintings were often misidentified as photographs — the work soon exhausted itself, so seldom was it able to exceed the limits of its subjects. Doolin, in similar paintings, instead incorporates a multitude of disparate and contradictory meanings, as well as highly crafted compositional schemes. Moreover, for all their convincing realism, Doolin’s works are in no sense photographic.

Discussing his painting in relation to contemporary art, Doolin is quick to set his work apart from Postmodernism in spite of the fact that his work evinces many of the features of this recent cultural phenomenon and art practice. To Doolin, Postmodernism misses the aesthetic and often the social mark. “I’m totally bored by painting that has a political agenda to it.”

Not that Doolin’s work is apolitical. The mystery and melancholy of the Doolin vision can be frighteningly prescient. Aerial views of street corners, such as Oasis, 1985-86, and the signal Shopping Mall, 1973-77, can be appreciated in formal, which is to say, abstract, terms. They likewise anticipate the TV news chopper perspective on the post-King Trial disturbances: as detached, anonymous, and indecipherable as they are convincing in their “realism.”

For an artist as absorbed as he seems to be in the image world of Here and Now, Doolin is quick to indicate a debt to past realist Masters, from the 19th century American Thomas Eakins (Doolin spent some formative years in Eakins’s city of Philadelphia) to the Renaissance figure Andrea Mantegna, to the Giotto of the magnificent Arena Chapel cycle. Its not necessary to carry a mental art history textbook in order to appreciate Doolin’s paintings, however. The multiple levels of meanings and associations — some certainly beyond even the artist’s conscious determination — make the experience of this art rewarding and challenging to a variety of audiences.

Toward the end of my conversation with the artist, Jim Doolin remarked that he sees the North Hollywood station in terms of three questions: Who will use the station? What is the “shape” of the project? Which medium is appropriate? Doolin’s logical framing of the design challenge certainly derives from his formalist roots. What will result is, at this point, anyone’s guess — including the painter’s.

Doolin stresses that the NoHo Subway “is not necessarily going to… resemble what I do now.” Speaking of the Metro line so far, he remarks that “the materials are good, it’s not unpleasant, and it seems to work.” So Doolin is about to embark on a process of discovery, or, in his word, “observation.” “I’m trying to get what’s out there [in the community].” Through the pending din of excavation and construction, NoHo residents listen for the word on Doolin’s project with excited expectation.

Highway Patrol by James Doolin, 1986 oil on canvas 72″ x 118″

East Wind by James Doolin, 1991 oil on canvas 72″ x 120″