Today we’d like to introduce you to Corbin Doyle
Hi Corbin, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’m a Texas kid. Growing up here in Dallas and in the Panhandle. I was always making things. Finding scraps of wood and making things out of them. Finding leftover building supplies around town and making versions of Star Wars weapons for my friends and me. Making forts and skateboard ramps. Before I was a teenager, I used all the money I made working to buy books, magazines, and records. Skate magazines were very impactful. In them I learned about punk bands but also about straight edge culture. I found an unused Super 8 movie camera and asked if I could get it running. At 13 I started at Jesuit High School and worked across the street at Crystal’s Pizza. I got free play at video games which was a huge win and the dollars to buy and process Super 8 film. I would think of every hour of work as a film or a record. Soon after I also started working at Southwest Art Supply. So now I had money for films, music, and discounts on art supplies, with the bonus of chances to talk with artists from Dallas coming in to buy supplies. During all of this I would plead with my parents to take me to the downtown library. I would just go up to the arts floor by myself and blindly take books off the shelf. I didn’t know what I was looking at or for. I knew I liked drawing and making things and making stories with the film camera so I would go to the filmmaking section and read scripts they had, interviews with filmmakers, how to cinematography books. If that wasn’t my thing for the day I would go to the arts sections and take down books about Renaissance paintings, The Mexican muralists, land art, architecture, anything and everything. I hadn’t had any art classes. None really until college. This meant that my curiosity for images and sounds was all over the place. I would hear Yacht Rock in the car with my family, Willie Nelson and classical music with my dad, Van Halen with my friends, and the amazing world of radio and record stores in town. I was hooked on opera after a school trip to see The Dallas Opera. Punk music and electronic music including home-grown Texas new wave. Mushing all of this together with the words and images I was finding at the library just taught me that anything was possible. On my first day at Jesuit, my first class was Theology with Fr. Schnadelbach. I was scared. He passed out little slips of paper with prescribed topics for our research papers. For whatever reason on that first day, I raised my hand and asked if I could make a film, instead of writing a paper. That was the end. I didn’t write many papers in high school, I just made things. Long/short I was left alone to find amazing art, and I didn’t have any adults telling me no or shaming me for what I was doing and finding. I don’t think any of them saw this as a career. I know I didn’t. I think part of this was rooted in punk and straight edge, and it wasn’t the lifestyle for me it was simply the idea that there wasn’t “A” form that I had to conform to be a kid, a student, or an artist. And the other part was living most of the time in a town that had accessible resources for me to get lost.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Not smooth, but always interesting. Hindsight is an amazing gift. I got to attend SMU as a PreMed major. I lived at home and would take science classes all day. I would draw in the margins of my science notes. A classmate told me SMU had a great art building and I should go by. That was a very hard door for me to walk into. I don’t know why. But I walked into the Studio Art area on the right day and met Barnaby Fitzgerald. He just introduced himself to me and I handed him my notes with my drawings. He wrote down his name, introduced me to classmates and other teachers, and told me I would be taking drawing the following Fall. That second year was polar to the first. Science classes all morning, labs in the afternoon, and art classes until late in the evening. Because of that amazing Meadows family and the gifts, they gave daily, I was offered a summer followship in CT at the Yale School of Art Norfolk program. 30 people were put together from all around the world to simply make in a large communal art studio. It was life changing. I left the south for the first time for this program when I was 22. I had friends and colleagues from all over the world now. At the end of that I was asked to go to Yale to get my MFA in Painting/Printmaking. They gave me a roadmap to follow for the next six years of my life; finishing SMU, 3 years of working, and 2 years for my MFA at Yale. The person that got me to this point should have seen this roadmap as problematic. Following a prescribed path. But I was a good student for them, I followed their directions to a T. When I was in New Haven it immediately became clear that following my own voice wasn’t what they wanted. There’s a lot to talk about but let’s just say it was rough. In a moment of freefall, I made an ink drawing of Willie Nelson from the album cover of his great album Red Headed Stranger. That dumb drawing spoke to me so much more than the rest of the work I was making. I don’t know why. I still don’t other than to say it was connected to me and was if nothing it was honest. They didn’t see things the same way. They asked me to leave the program pretty soon after. So, I came back to Dallas, with no home, my tail between my legs, feeling like I had failed all the people in my life. I had been told that the worst-case scenario after my MFA I would be a professor in a college if I couldn’t make a living being an artist alone. That was all gone. No MFA meant no teaching job. I was so angry at folks involved, but mostly at me. But that freefall freed me. I started making right and left. And making in all media including filmmaking. I was picked up by galleries in town and worked on Texas film projects and as an art assistant.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I won the Dallas Museum of Art Award in the late 90’s. The story is that some families from Greenhill School were in the room for that ceremony. I got a call that next week to come in for an interview. Our child was a year old, and that art life money was feast and famine then, so I said I would teach for one year. That was 27 years ago. I am very proud of what I have built at Greenhill. It’s a testament to a special school. Not only did they trust my ideas, but they gave me the space to build a filmmaking program from nothing. I now teach 7th through 12th graders. We have a large program at Greenhill. As one metric alone we’ve had over 50 films at SxSW Film Festival from students and many more from alums who have gone through the program with me. I made this whole world on the model of what I would have wanted when I was in school. There are so many alums in the entertainment world from these classes. But the intent is never about making filmmakers and artists. It’s 100% about the students having a space to tell their own stories. That’s it. We live in a world where every student has a great film camera in their pocket, with free screenwriting software, film editing software, and distribution on sites like YouTube. What was so expensive for me as a 13-year-old is now basically free for them. That is power. Anyone one of them can tell their story, right a wrong, make beautiful music, tell someone they love them, tell a joke, or anything they can imagine. That is such beautiful power.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
I wouldn’t be doing this interview if I was raised somewhere else. As a young-un Dallas gave me the library that was my art school. The DMA which blew my mind, and I couldn’t wait to return to because I could get lost in an area and then on the next visit go to a totally different world and time. Deep Ellum which allowed way too young me stand outside of clubs and hear punk shows and bands like New Bohemians and The Judy’s. The Dallas Opera which to this day is one of my greatest joys. The Dallas Video Fest and Bart Weiss who would answer letters from teenage me about filmmaking and connect me with other filmmakers. Great galleries including Barry Whistler who talked with the dumb kid who kept coming back to see these amazing James Surls sculptures and then introduced me to Surls. Art Spaces like 500X and the Continental Gin who would always let foolish me enter and feel welcome helmed by saints like Frances Bagley, Tom Orr, and James Watral. SMU and the Meadows School of the Arts who I wouldn’t have finished college without including Roger Winter who would sit and talk with me about telling my own stories and introduced me to David Bates. Great film festivals like USA where we watched the short for Bottle Rocket and everyone in the room celebrated, AFI Dallas, and Pegasus Film Festival which is the largest student run film fest in this country. Collectors like the Hanley’s who always believed and trusted. In less than an hour you can be in Ft. Worth and see amazing things at the Kimbell, Amon Carter, and the Ft. Worth Modern in an afternoon. You can get to Austin and Houston and go see totally different worlds. You can drive west into the mountains, but also see the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. This is a state that can let you get lost but also be found.
Hurdles with Dallas nowadays? I think the city that was pretty affordable for me in the 80’s and 90’s is no longer so. And it’s pretty near impossible to be a woman or LGTBQIA in this state and feel safe and represented. I know Texas can be better. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Image Credits
Thomas Bozalis, Sara Ellis, Katie Young, A. Shanks, S. Hooligan
