Medieval science inspires Tallmade Doyle to create rich layers of texture and color

TALLMADGE DOYLE has long been drawn to the strange beauty of the natural world. The imagery of her elaborately layered prints has often grown out of the intricate biology of insects, flowers and ocean creatures. Now she's moved into a slightly different artistic realm: the iconography of early scientists and alchemists. Entranced by old books she found buried at the library of the University of Oregon, where she teaches printmaking in the fine arts department, Doyle spent last summer exploring the look of astrological symbols, alchemists' charts and antiquated laboratory equipment.

"I wanted to do something new this summer," she explained during a recent visit at her Eugene studio. "I've always been interested in history, and I started looking at the history of medicine. Did you know we used to have a medical school here? There are lots of old books in the university library." Doyle found herself fascinated by the arcane symbols and icons used by ancient and medieval alchemists to notate their practice. She was also interested in the alchemists themselves, who - despite the popular notion - did not always literally devote themselves to the quest of making gold out of lead. "That was a front," she says. "A veil. The whole thing of making gold was a metaphor for purifying themselves spiritually."

Like the ancient alchemists, Doyle uses complex and sometimes arcane processes to create her art. She combines a number of traditional art printing processes, from etching and aquatint to woodcut and chine colle with simple application of paint by paintbrush, making many of her prints more like one-of-a-kind creations. A typical Doyle print might be run through the press half a dozen or eight times, each time acquiring a new layer of imagery. The resulting work has remarkable depth, with superimposed images and color seeming to pull the viewer into ever deeper relationships. Her prints are are visually rich but definitely have an intellectual side to them, though it would be simplistic to try to read them as nothing more than postmodernist symbols or texts.

"I use layering to create depth and space," she says. "You are looking through the veils, diaphanous layers. Looking through and into the space. You are looking to the other side - not just seeing what's on the surface." Doyle's work approaches textile in its use of repetition and pattern. Her prints are not pictures of any particular thing so much as they are inventions and symphonies of a whole range of visual delight. "It's all about being able to see through certain things to other things," she says. "It's like the research I have been doing, looking into the whole origins of medicine thing. You read up on one thing and you read something else and that will be a more in-depth layer. So you're sifting though information and seeing through and getting through - I don't want to say `spiritual' - there is a word - `ethereal' is the word? I don't know. I kind of got lost there. You're not seeing just what's on the surface. You're looking deeper than that."

Doyle grew up just outside New York City; her father is a writer of such books as "The Vegetarian Handbook." She always knew she wanted to be an artist, and entered school at the Cleveland Art Institute, where she planned to become a jewelry maker. Soon, though, she found herself pulled by drawing, a field that was just then - the late 1970s - coming into its own in the art world as a respectable stand-alone medium, rather than as simply a foundation for other visual arts. After graduating, she moved west to Seattle and later to San Luis Obispo, Calif., gradually changing her focus from drawing and painting to printmaking. "What attracted me to printmaking was the richness of prints and the beautiful line quality you can get with prints," Doyle says. "Everything about printmaking, I love: the ink and working with the copper, that beautiful metal. And I love the smell of the ink."

Printmaking is also freeing for Doyle as an artist. "You have to give up an element of control," she says. "And that makes me take many more chances. And it makes the exploration much more exciting - it's as though there's another player in the game." Doyle works on a dozen or more prints at a time, building up images in layers as she moves from one process to the next. "Working on a lot of pieces at a time helps me a lot," she says. "I don't get fixated on one piece. You can always print more."

In a typical progression, she might begin an image with a simple woodcut, which provides a colored background that gives the work its foundation. Next, she'll add delicate, calligraphic layers from etched copper plates, sometimes printing the same plates multiple times with the images rotated or reversed. From there, she might add layers of delicate color in an etching process called aquatint, and then finish the print off with the addition of hand color. The resulting images are visually complex and have a deeply layered look that seems to pull the viewer forward, both in space and in time; the piling on of images and icons seems to reflect the very ambiguity and secrecy of the alchemists' quest. "Printmaking really lends itself to layers," Doyle says. "I like creating that gradation from one color to the next. There is a certain richness you can't get any other way."

Doyle has exhibited steadily throughout her career without ever becoming an art star. Her work is in the collections of the Portland Art Museum and Oregon State University, where she's often been featured in the annual Art About Agriculture show. Three years ago, in a rare move from contemplative to more political art, Doyle helped spearhead an art exhibit about gun violence in response to the 1998 Thurston High School shootings. In "Life Out of Balance," which was exhibited at the Hult Center's Jacobs Gallery, Doyle convinced eight other local artists to join forces in a show about violence. Her own contribution was a series of six large prints, each interleaving images of a child's body with various kinds of weapons.

Nov. 10, 2002