Tallmadge Doyle

Artist Bio

Born in New York City, Tallmadge Doyle currently resides in Eugene, Oregon where she has lived and worked since 1989. She received her BFA in drawing from the Cleveland Art Institute and her MFA in printmaking from the University of Oregon where she has taught Printmaking as an Adjunct Professor since 1997.

Her work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Portland Art Museum’s Gilkey Print Collection, the Oregon State University Art About Agriculture Collection, the City of Seattle Portable Works Collection, and the Cleveland Art Association Collection.

She is represented by the Davidson Galleries in Seattle and the Augen Gallery in Portland.

About this work:

Constellations are an invention of the human imagination. They are an expression of a desire to order the chaos of the night sky. For farmers who wanted an agricultural calendar, for shepherds who needed a nightly clock, for navigators and explorers dividing the sky into recognizable groupings, constellations were a practical necessity.

The constellation figures are symbolic, celestial allegories in which humans can honor and recognize sacred animals, deities, and moral tales. Throughout the centuries artists have depicted these groupings of stars. The images of these groupings and creatures have been created and recreated with various similarities and differences. Much artistic license is taken in this body of work. They are not all accurate in terms of their star’s mathematical proportions and distances but they do carry on an age-old tradition of storytelling that started with the Babylonians and Sumerians, passed on to the Egyptians and later to the Greeks and Romans.

Tallmadge Doyle’s Website

Tallmadge Doyle at Davidsone Galleries