Ten Years of "Unreal Estate" at Cloud Tree Gallery
Oh, the places you only wish you could go!
By Wayne Alan Brenner, 4:30PM, Wed. Aug. 10, 2022
In February of 2012, Austin’s renowned pop-culture posterista Tim Doyle had his first solo art show – featuring silk-screened, hand-pulled prints – at the Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco. The level of response, as well as the subjects of that artwork, was unreal.
Doyle’s “Unreal Estate” is a collection of locations that many of us know and have been to on a weekly basis, but we can never actually visit. These places are in our memories – transmitted and entrenched there through a cathode-ray tube or an enormous screen. Some of us have been going to these places for decades; some of them were taken from us, way too soon.
Moe’s Tavern from The Simpsons. Satriale’s Pork Store from The Sopranos. The Short Stop convenience store from Raising Arizona. The Rosebud Motel from Schitt's Creek. Mr. Hooper’s shop from Sesame Street. More and more, on and on – location, location, location – with enough vivid images for six all-new Spoke Art solo shows over 10 years.
Hell, Doyle’s company Nakatomi, Inc. even released a book of the ever-increasing array of works.
And now – this very weekend – that prescient Ken Harman of Spoke Art temporarily forsakes California to stake a claim on Austin soil, presenting 10 years’ worth of “Unreal Estate” at Cloud Tree Gallery, Aug. 11-14.
Note: There’ll be an opening reception on Thursday, and then the show’ll be accessible from 11am-6pm through Sunday.
We already accessed the artist himself, so to speak, to ask how this area of creative expression first came about …
“So, in 2011, I’d had artwork in a few shows at Spoke Art,” says Doyle, pausing for a brief interview before heading off to Chicago Comic Entertainment Expo. “Like for their ‘Bad Dads’ show, which was a Wes Anderson-themed show. And then the ‘Quentin vs. Coen’ art show. And all those prints did very well, so Ken asked me if I’d be interested in having a solo show in February of the following year – about eight months away, at that point. So I started created pieces, and I didn’t have a theme, but the third one I came up with was that Kwiki-Mart from The Simpsons, with the cooling towers from the Springfield power plant behind it. And Ken said, ‘Hey, these other pieces you did are great, but the whole show should be just this. Fictional places.’
“And, once I started thinking about it, I’d been looking at the sketchbooks of Chris Ware. And he had some really nice building portraits, and I was like, ‘Man, that really looks fun – I want to do that!’ So, with Ken wanting me to focus on one subject, and the Chris Ware stuff in mind, I just kind of ran with it. And the more I worked on it, the more I thought about what these locations mean. We all know them, they all exist in our consciousness. We could all draw, you know, a map of the Cheers bar if we wanted to. We all know these physical spaces, but we can never really go there – which is where the name ‘Unreal Estate’ came from.”
And this weekend’s show comes from those illustrations?
“This is a 10-year anniversary retrospective show,” says Doyle, “so I’ll have a lot of pieces framed up. And there’ll be five or six new pieces – new for this show – and variants of those, and the original artwork.”
And why Cloud Tree this time? Why not, per usual, Spoke Art out in San Francisco?
“Ken has been wanting to check out the Austin market,” says Doyle, “maybe for setting up a gallery here? I guess this is kind of like the pilot.”
Well, but everybody and their sister is “checking out the Austin market” lately. Why the choice of Cloud Tree in particular?
“It was nice and affordable and not too far from Downtown,” says the raven-haired screenprint maven. “I toured the space, and it’s a really nice building. I like it quite a bit – it reminds me of old Austin. And I was pleasantly surprised that they work with Ethan Azarian a lot. I love Ethan – I have his art up in my house, I did a lot of early shows with him at his house on Leralynn.”
“Spoke Art just reached out to me,” says Brian David Johnson. Johnson’s been running the well-regarded Cloud Tree venue since 2016 and recently signed the lease for another five years. “They’d probably already scouted the city and just wanted a closer look. I mean, I haven’t really done research and compared our rates with the other places, but we try to keep things affordable here. And we did a Zoom call, with me showing them the space. And, later, Tim came over to check it out in person. And, like everybody who sees the space – it doesn’t matter what stripe of person, whatever age they are – I don’t know what it is about this building, but they walk in the door and they fall in love. There’s a vibe here, I think. And Tim was like, ‘Oh, this is awesome.’”
And Johnson was no stranger to Doyle’s, ah, oeuvre.
“I’m very familiar with Tim’s work,” confirms the affable Cloud Tree owner. “I’ve been doing shows, at other venues, with him for years. I don’t know him personally, but his work is stellar. And I have this one print of his, that – I was getting my hair cut at Bird’s, in the summer of 2013, while having this blissful romance with a jeweler who’d moved here from North Carolina? And I was like, ‘Wow, we might have a kid some day,’ thinking about this woman. And I walk into Bird’s Barbershop and I see this Doyle print on the wall, and – I’m really a romantic – I was like, ‘Aaah, that’s a killer image! We could put that up in the kid’s room, and this will inspire her towards magic and beauty and depth of consciousness!’ And, you know, three months later, my heart was totally broken. But I still have a Tim Doyle poster.”
And – broken heart or not, citizen – you, too, could have a Doyle poster.
“The prints will be available locally at the Cloud Tree show,” says Doyle, “and then on the Spoke Art site after that. They’re all first editions, so they’ll be signed and numbered in those editions. And, as usual, there’ll probably be new editions if they sell very well. And the Unreal Estate book, with the first three years’ worth of art and a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff, that’s always available at Nakatomi and Spoke Art.”
A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.