Painting from Instinct

I can tell Stephen Coyle is a smart guy by how comfortable he is talking about what he doesn’t know. We’re wading through decades worth of canvases at his Pawtucket studio, and he says he doesn’t know whether it’s motivation or addiction that sometimes prompts him to paint for 14 hours a day. He says he’s in the midst of an artistic transition, but then throws up his hands with a surrendering smile and says, “I don’t know what the hell I’m going through.” When I ask him what it’s like making a living as an artist, he says he doesn’t know when the next check will come in the mail. And he says he didn’t know anything when he took a bus from Boston to LA in the late 1970s and decided to become a painter.

Stephen’s studio takes up the entire first floor of the two-family house where he lives with his wife, and contains a dizzying maze of paintings spanning the breadth of his three-decade career. The floor of the apartment’s double parlor is spackled with years of paint, and the rooms are filled with work – like the still-life of two Old Milwaukee beer cans kept company by only their shadows; a series of triptychs telling the life story of a movie theater popcorn container; a larger than life depiction of an antique Bozo the Clown weeble-wobble; and his current work in progress, a large-scale beach scene that he’s hoping to finish in time for this year’s Art Basel in Miami. “I was pulling out some stuff to give you an historical overview,” he says, as we walk back towards the kitchen, where printouts of inspirational phrases (Find what you love and let it kill you!) are taped to the wall, “and I realized that it’s all my daughter’s fault,” he says.

What he means is that when his daughter was born in 1996, his life and his creative process changed indefinitely. As a baby she was colicky, so he could only paint at night when she was asleep. When she was a toddler, he started painting still lifes of her Beanie Baby collection. When she got a little older, he found inspiration in the way a sensor light illuminated her kiddie pool while he was taking out the trash. That inspiration turned into a series of night scenes in his backyard, which turned into a show entitled Pools of Light and Dark at the Chase Young Gallery in Boston in 2004. The paintings are both humorous and haunting – colorful folding chairs fading into darkness, a young girl staring at you, jumping on an un- made bed in the night. “When these came out, I got a great review in The Boston Globe,” he says. “They called it a ‘tour de force of painting.’ I didn’t sell a single one.”

Before long, Stephen’s daughter outgrew the kiddie pool, so they started going to Walden Pond, where he did another series. “And after that,” he says, “she was tired of Walden Pond, she wanted to go to the ocean... so that lead to the beach stuff.

We walk back into the parlor, where Stephen talks about his current beach scene, an impressionistic sprawl of sand littered with sunbathers that he says is partly inspired by 16th century painter Pieter Bruegel. On the wall adjacent to this is a series of freeway paintings – rear window views of cars on a drizzly highway, headlights cutting through the grey. “There’s really no difference between a freeway with all the cars and a beach full of people,” says Stephen. “It’s really the same painting in way.”

Stephen grew up in Boston and, after a short stint going to school for radio, TV and film, he tells me, “I just said to hell with it. I bought a one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles. I was out there for a couple years trying different things, like Stephen Coyle in his Pawtucket studio acting – horrible. Trying to write – horrible. I was walking down Sunset Boulevard and there was a sign advertising painting and drawing classes, and I said ‘oh, I could do that.’ I don’t know why. I just walked in and after the first drawing I knew that was it.”

Since then, Stephen has shown his work at solo and group exhibitions all over the country, and is currently represented by galleries in San Francisco and Naples, Florida. Recent work includes a series of portraits of rotary phones on sunny disheveled beds, stark views of the apartment buildings on his street in Pawtucket and more beaches populat- ed with people and their untold stories.

Incidentally, Stephen’s daughter is now away at art school in LA. I ask him what motivates him to wake up and paint these days, aside from the loom- ing threat of tuition bills.
“I have no idea what makes me come down here, but I know I have to... you know, instinctually or subconsciously, sometimes you just know stuff, and you have to follow that instinct.”

You can see some of Stephen Coyle’s past work at stephencoylefineart.com
or view his current exhibitions at paulthiebaudgallery.com and trudylabellfineart.com