Funeral for a Twig Painter

  

Here's a flashback to a post first published in Tumblr on October 3, 2015.

 

 Richard James Doyle of Pine Point, better known as The Twig Painter, was buried earlier this week in the Veteran’s cemetery in Agawam after dying September 23rd at age 72. Doyle hated funerals, and his parent’s were the only two funerals I believe he ever attended. He made a drunken appearance in the parking lot of the funeral of Jay Libardi, but I don’t recall that he ever actually went inside.

Here is Doyle the Twig Painter arriving Wednesday at a funeral he couldn’t avoid.

 

 

Doyle served in various places in Southeast Asia at the peak of the Vietnam War and was buried with full military honors. He was an Army Illustrator, which means he did artwork for military publications. That also meant that he never came within a hundred miles of the battlefield. I’m not saying that to take anything away from Doyle’s service to his country, as every war is a team effort which without the people working behind the lines, the heroes at the front couldn’t succeed.

However, because he served during the peak years of the war, people sometimes used to ask him if he saw any action. “I saw plenty of action,” Doyle used to reply, “I just can’t remember her name.”

Because he was such a humorous person, people didn’t always appreciate how serious he was about his art and how hard he worked. It involved a lot of long hours of scratching away to make those beautiful paintings using a twig. I first realized just how hard he labored over those paintings when I was working at Eastern Container, a cardboard box factory in the 16 Acres section of Springfield.

I worked third shift, and on many mornings when we got off work at 7am, we used to go out for a drink or two or ten. That may sound odd, but think about it. When someone who works 9 to 5 gets off work, do they rush home to bed by 6pm? No, they stay awake for hours and may enjoy some adult beverages just as we did, only our hours were reversed.

Anyway, there are not many bars open at 7am, but one that opened at 8am was the infamous Pine Point Cafe. So one summer morning while Jay Libardi and I were sitting in the parking lot of the Cafe waiting for Jackie the bartender to come open the joint up, I looked across the street and saw Doyle the Twig Painter sitting outside his gallery painting away with a twig. I went over and asked him why he had gotten up so early to paint. He informed me that he didn’t wake up to paint - the fact was he hadn’t been to bed yet! Doyle had been sitting out there on Boston Road painting all night long.

When someone dies, people sometimes like to speculate that friends and relatives meet them when they arrive on that other shore. I hope that’s true, and if it is, then Doyle had quite a welcoming committee. The scene surrounding Doyle the Twig Painter was very colorful, but it had a body count. When I try to imagine who would greet The Twig Painter at the pearly gates, I think I see Yvonne Gordon. I think I see Crystal. I think I see Debbie Dog. I think I see Marc Walker. I think I see Gordy, I think I see Tom Chatterton and his son. I think I see Eric Lerch. I think I see Bodie Chesbro. I think I see J. Wesley Miller. I think I see Jay Libardi. 

I first met Doyle when I was a boy. The Pine Point section of Springfield has its charms, but culturally it was something of a desert, or at least that’s how it looked to a sensitive, artistically and culturally inclined kid like me. Fortunately, Doyle’s art gallery was, as Tom Shea of the Springfield Republican once described it, “a touch of bohemia in old Pine Point.”

It isn’t easy to do what you want in this life. All the most powerful forces in society conspire against it with constant messages to copy others, to fit in and admonishments to be an obedient member of the herd. Richard Doyle showed me by example that you could pretty much do what you wanted with your life, just as he had done with an artistic technique he had invented himself. 

It was not a sugar-coated example, he made it plain that to do what you want requires hard work and a lot of courage. Hard work, so that you can move forward with little help from others, and a lot of courage of your own because you will get little encouragement from anyone else. In fact, you have to be brave enough to resist the people who will aggressively try to discourage you. What a wonderful example of the possibilities for a personalized success he gave me at the dawn of my adult life, when it mattered most.

But I think the greatest lesson in courage Doyle gave me had nothing to do with doing your own thing. It had to do with the last years of his life, when he was forced to give up Twig Painting because of blindness. I think if you asked any practitioner of the visual arts what their worst nightmare was, they would reply that the thing that terrifies them most would be to lose their sight.

Doyle the Twig Painter was forced to live that nightmare. I remember when I went to see him in the hospital for the first time after the doctors had given him their conclusion that his loss of sight was irreversible and that he would never paint again. I was anxious about our meeting, as I feared I would find my friend in a black depression, a broken man whose whole life had been shattered by the doctor’s terrible verdict. Instead, when I entered his hospital room he cried out, “Tommy! Let me tell you the dirty joke the nurse told me this morning!” Then I knew that he was going to be alright.

No one who knew Doyle the Twig Painter ever expects to meet another person quite like him in this world.  Right now, he and his welcoming committee are having a big old party on some cloud floating a little apart from everyone else in heaven. Someday, I will join that party, but hopefully not any time soon.

Doyle the Twig Painter - Rest easy, wild spirit.

 

 

 David Doyle accepting the flag from his brother's casket.