Chris Doyle, a multimedia artist who made poetic and beguiling pieces — exquisite animated work that explored ideas about civilization and evolution — and who once gilded a stairway to the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City, died on July 22 at his home in Blue Hill, Maine. He was 66.
His husband, Timothy Houlihan, said the cause was a cardiac event.
A painter with a master’s degree in architecture, Mr. Doyle thought of buildings and machines as objects imbued with emotion, and he used all sorts of media to make inanimate things come to life. He was interested in systems — from the natural world to the technological.
Mr. Doyle drew inspiration from Charlie Chaplin’s film “Modern Times,” in which Chaplin’s tramp character labors in a factory making mysterious and useless products, and from the work of the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole. He was also influenced by Disney animation, William Morris wallpaper, Persian miniatures, illuminated manuscripts and the extraordinary environments of Kurt Schwitters, the early-20th-century German artist who turned his home into a livable sculpture.
In a series of short films made from 2004 to 2007, Mr. Doyle used stop-motion photography to animate hotel beds, their sheets and pillows scooting this way and that, accompanied by various aural symphonies: ambient tones, metallic clattering, rustling noises. In one film from 2003, lawn chairs and a garden hose run amok.
In 2014, imagining Times Square before civilization came along, Mr. Doyle created a fantastical animation he called “Bright Canyon” — a vibrant gorge filled with psychedelic patterned creatures, exotic greenery and cascading waterfalls projected on the billboards there. It was one of his many public artworks.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post Chris Doyle, Artist Who Brought the Inanimate to Life, Dies at 66 appeared first on New York Times.
