profile
It’s often hard to tell exactly when you begin a career as an artist. As children, both of us loved to play with clay – but that’s been true of countless other children the world over for untold generations. And it really was just fun for us, but now when we look back on those days, we also see that, even then, we’d started on the road to our current calling. It helped, of course, that we were raised in a family of artists. Both of our parents drew and painted, and our father, James Doolin, was respected in the art world. But it was our mother, Leslie Doolin, who started it all for us professionally when she decided to paint on tile: Eventually we joined her in what was to become
To those who see art as frivolous and ultimately unnecessary and expendable, we offer as a counterweight the following from Austrian poet, Ernst Fisher: "Art is a driving force in bringing humankind to greater quality of life, and it is therefore an absolute cultural necessity." For the artist, tremendous responsibility comes with that necessity. Indeed, those who expose others to art bear a burden in shaping entire cultures as people around them come to accept their artistic output as essential threads in the social fabric. Think of Brunelleschi in Renaissance Florence, for example, or Gaudi in modern Barcelona. When we as watershape or landscape designers seek to expose others to our works of art, we accept a profound moral responsibility whether we work in the public or the private domain. At its core, our responsibility is to seek and communicate truth. As we see it, one and all who fall under the broad umbrella of the watershaping arts should be
