Bob Doucette

Bob Doucette was raised in Maine surrounded by a very arty community. He started drawing and painting as a child and was encouraged by his parents with art lessons. He started painting classes at age eight but his mother decided he was too messy for oil paints and he switched to acrylics soon after. He has been using them ever since. Several amazing Maine artist taught and encouraged his development as an artist. Bob's second love after painting is sculpting and he started making dolls and puppets at age twelve. By junior high he started a puppet troupe called the Messypiece Theatre which regularly performed at the children's room of the local public library and at the Maine Blueberry festival. Many news paper clippings and an interview on public radio rounded out Bob's early puppetry career. Bob also enjoyed performing on stage in Junior High and High School musicals. On route to college Bob took on a job at Camp Manitou in Oakland Maine. He worked in the theater where he met the theater director Marc Jacobs who became a mentor, teacher and friend. After ten summers of making costumes, painting sets and directing plays with children he finished his camp career having designed over fifty plays, painting hundreds of posters, directing several videos and writing a handful of plays with Jacobs. The team did so well together at camp that Bob has been employed several times through the years in various positions working for the director. At Rhode Island School of Design Doucette double majored in illustration and animation. Bob's thesis film "Bessie and Erna" was featured in several film festivals including, Lucca Animation Festival in Italy, Annecy International Animation festival in France,Toronto International Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and upon graduation the film was bought by a rental company to be included in their film catalog. The film was notable for appearing to be a moving painting without the traditional outlines of classic animation. After school Bob made another film "Jimmy's Home Movie" while living in New York City. To finish the film he moved back to Rhode Island and got help from his former R.I.S.D. faculty. They generously let him use their cameras to film his movie. At this time Bob joined the Puppet Workshop of Providence where he designed puppets and sets, wrote plays and performed in many of the main stage shows guided by the brilliant artistic director, Mark Kohler. The pinnacle of his second puppetry career was meeting Jim Henson and joining in a Muppet Workshop, learning how to make puppets with the wonderful people who made all the Sesame Street Muppets. Bob moved to California to continue his education at CalArts and earned a master's degree in animation. His CalArts thesis film "The Pink Triangle" was shown at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and was made part of the permanent collection of the New York Public Library. It has been featured in several film festivals and was reviewed on In the Life on public TV. It was the first animated film to deal with the plight of the homosexuals under the Nazi regime and became a big presence in the gay film festival circuit around the world throughout the 1990's. Upon graduating, Bob moved to Los Angeles where he continued his design career and eventually went into animation. Although he has worked in animation for twenty years, he never gave up his own personal art work. Bob has continued to paint and sculpt while working at animation and has always desired the opportunity to break out as a gallery artist. In 1989 Bob partnered with Tom Slotten, a professional costumer, to make over a hundred fine art dolls together. Slotten made the costumes while Bob sculpted, painted and accessorized the dolls. Their work has been collected and commissioned by many art collectors all over the world including, Demi Moore, who owns over a dozen of their pieces. Hillary Clinton commissioned them to make a doll for the White House Christmas tree in 1999 and their Ben Franklin doll is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian.