Alan Doyle is a self taught artist who lives in Wicklow , Ireland. His charcoal works on paper, inhabited by elongated figures and animals are drawn from his subconscious and provide a portal into a world that exists beyond time and just below the surface. This is Doyle’s first exhibition in the U.S. His work is represented in the UK by the Henry Boxer Gallery, home of artists Madge Gill & Adolph Wolfi and other European Art Brute masters.
Here are excerpts from an article written by Colin Rhodes, Hunan Normal University, for a French Publication.
Alan Doyle's recent black and white drawings seem to emanate from a primal realm. His figures and creatures are autochthons revealed for twenty-first century eyes. They are very much of the earth. They belong absolutely to the landscapes they occupy and from which they seemingly arise. The artist achieves all this with a striking economy of means – sometimes even pictorial clues to the places his figures inhabit are absent, and yet the viewer is led to believe, somehow, in their existence in an activated space that forever hovers at the ill-defined boundary between the mundane visual world and unformed realm of eternal form-making.
Each drawing characteristically contains only a limited number of participants, ranging from human and animal figures to hybrid creatures, that only intensify the sense of an ancient psychic elsewhere.
Doyle was born in 1984 in County Meath, Ireland, an area well known for its prehistoric monuments. The third of four children, he grew up mostly in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, which he still calls home today. His schooling was disrupted at times because of ill-health, and he was unable to fully participate in the kinds of physical play in which most children engage. These solitary periods actually fed his early discovery of drawing and making things. Time spent in artistic pursuits gave form and structure to the passing hours and enabled him to engage in acts of constant creation and recreation of imaginative worlds that reflected his developing personal vision.
Although he applied to study art, his disrupted schooling had left him without the qualifications deemed necessary for his preferred course. He enrolled on another, but soon dropped out when he realized it would not deliver the things he wanted from art making. Disheartened by it all, for a few years he concentrated instead on a regular job. But the call to make art and music was irresistible. He gave up the security of paid employment and from that time on devoted himself full time to the creative vocation.
The mystery in Doyle’s drawings is reinforced by his reluctance to give them titles. This is not a result of any desire on his part to obfuscate, but rather to allow individual viewers scope to interrogate and interpret images in the ways in which they might speak as directly to them as they do him. “I’ve always been apprehensive about leading the viewer too much,” he tells us, “I like to leave room for interpretation and for people to bring their own ideas to the work.” There is, to be sure, a certain organicist belief here in the communicative power of his drawings: “I love words and poetry,” he says, “And I read and write. But I like the images to speak for themselves.”