Artist Dee Doyle practices what she teaches

Art is an ageless pursuit. La Conner artist Dee Doyle is not only painting, in what she calls her encore career, she’s teaching Skagit Valley locals from ages 50 to 100 to do the same.

The Maryland transplant describes her painting – still lifes, abstracts and landscapes – as her fourth career, following many years dedicated to downtown revitalization, economic develop-ment and then real estate sales. She came to the Pacific Northwest in 2005.

As a high school student she had hoped to attend design school but her parents, at that time, didn’t see any future for a young woman in art. From there, life happened, and her focus became raising a family and her career.

So today she is a proponent of creative expression for any one, at any time in life.

Doyle got serious about art at the age of 60 in Maryland and took courses at a local college. Since she moved to the Skagit Valley, she says, “My focus has turned inward rather than outward.” She seeks the images around her which have an emotional appeal. She points to Henri Matisse’s philosophy which he described this way: “I don’t literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”

Doyle is influenced by Im-pressionists and Expressionists and her art – featuring flowers, birds and figures – similarly expresses that inner response to the world around her. “I find I really see the beauty in things. I love driving through the valley and seeing all the colors of the sky,” she says.

Early into her artistic development in Skagit Valley she took a painting class that she found frustrating. “I wanted to teach a class in a way that I wasn’t being taught.” She started teaching at the Burlington Senior Center and now offers a class at the Anacortes Senior Center. Doyle teaches in watercolor and acrylics and gives workshops in other mediums, but not oils; their fumes bother her.

Doyle is a strong proponent of practicing your art, at any age, even when you doubt your own talent. Art is in fact a skill, she says, that needs to be developed. “To me it’s never about ability it’s about priority. If there’s something you want badly enough you have the same 24 hours to develop it that everyone else has.”

Learning the fundamentals is essential, from there, but she encourages her students to think independently. “I coach people to work with what they see,” and that means not painting based on their teacher’s style or aesthetic. “I don’t want a class of students who all paint the same way. I wouldn’t want people to see someone’s work and say, ‘That’s a student of Dee Doyle’.”

Last year Doyle’s students participated in a “creativity through art in later years” exhibit at MoNA.

Doyle rejects descriptions of herself as a good artist, or even an artist at all. “I don’t want to be labelled anything. I want to be a verb,” and therefore Doyle is not a painter, she paints. She’s not a teacher, she teaches; and throughout her life, she says, she learns.

Ruby Martin, an artist who both lived and taught classes at La Conner’s Retirement Inn inspires her. “She gave me the freedom to paint,” reflected Doyle. Over time Doyle morphed from Martin’s assistant to eventually teaching some of Martin’s students at the senior centers. “She was truly pivotal in my life and didn’t even know it.”

Doyle’s classes aren’t geared toward beginners, intermediate or advanced students: She doesn’t use those labels: “You will always cut yourself short if you self-evaluate.” Neither does she let self-criticism control a student’s work. “You don’t ever let them implode and say they hate what they did.” Instead she encourages artists to view their work as a process of planning, painting and critiquing. “Students sometimes surprise the hell out of themselves. It’s very personal. I coach them out of a negative place and give them love when they need it,” she observes.

Her art classes meet in the Anacortes and Burlington senior centers weekly. Walk-ins are welcome.

Doyle’s work is on exhibit at Hadrian Stone Gallery in Edison through April. She recently completed a solo art show at the Art Bar at Lincoln Theater.