Los Angeles artist and writer Doug Harvey notes that his paintings allow us "to see the places we overlook every day and to recognize that, in spite of its ominous industrial overtones, the city is shot through with a luminous, electric vitality and a psychological potency verging on the mythic.
[3] His father, a successful insurance salesman, wanted his son to follow him in a business career, but in 1950, Doolin applied to the University of Vermont with the intention of pursuing a liberal arts education.
Discharged from the army in 1957, Doolin moved to New York and worked as a freelance commercial artist in advertising for the next four years, creating art in his limited spare time.
[3] Re-energized, Doolin settled into a rented a house on the island of Rhodes and painted, inspired by the mosaics he had viewed throughout southern Europe, and most notably, Ravenna, Italy.
These landscapes dealt with man-made as opposed to natural environments, and "related directly to the streetscapes of his [Greenwich Village] neighborhood - road signs, building walls, darkened doorways, and billboards from the semi-industrial area close to the docks."
Doolin fared much better in Sydney, a city at that time more receptive to the New York-inspired aesthetic of the period, with a well-received exhibition of his Artificial Landscapes at Central Street Gallery in 1967.
[3] Doolin spent four years (1973–77) working on this piece, "a large-scale, detailed aerial view of the intersection of Arizona Avenue and Third Street in Santa Monica -- which established his reputation as an important contemporary interpreter of the Western landscape.
"[1] The artist "spent the first two years sketching and photographing the site from every possible rooftop vantage point, then constructed a highly detailed diagonal composition of a busy intersection.
[3] In 1980, on the heels of this latest success and the dissolution of his marriage, Doolin was awarded a three-year Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship,[2] which allowed the artist to relocate to a remote stretch of the Mojave Desert to paint.
In his signature rendering of "negative social spaces -- bus stops, empty billboards, the dry trough of the L.A. River, the concrete islands between freeway onramps," the artist achieved an unlikely marriage between the "lurid sublimity of California landscape tradition" and "postindustrial apocalyptic melancholy.".
[2] After his masterful, incandescent painting Psychic headlined the traveling exhibition "Representing L.A.," (2000–2002) and the San Jose Museum of Art held a retrospective of his work in 2001,[3] his reputation as a major Los Angeles artist solidified.