Excerpt from "Knowing a Place" by Deborah Weisgall (Originally published in the Alexandre Gallery exhibition catalog, Lois Dodd: Small Paintings) Lois Dodd begins with portable squares and rectangles of masonite or wood. She paints on them the places where she has lived-the Maine coast, western New Jersey, Manhattan. For decades, she has painted summers in Maine, winter weekends in New Jersey near the Delaware Water Gap, and New York in between. She says that all her paintings are, fundamentally, landscapes, and all of them are close to home. "There is something about knowing a place," she says."Over time you keep changing, you see things differently. And the various places I love to paint change as well." In all seasons she takes her panels outdoors, so most of these paintings are quick, completed in one sitting. In New Jersey, she says, she waits for windless, sunny winter days when it is possible to work for several hours; in Maine she goes with friends to old granite quarries; she sits in her neighbor's garden; she sets up at the ferry landing in Rockland; she paints barns, from the inside and the outside. In Maine she also uses the barn beside her house for a studio. These paintings record place, but they also record the act of translating place into paint-the artist's intervention. Her distinct and fluid brush strokes seem casual at first, but they are precisely and elegantly laid down. The paintings in this exhibition, some fifty of them, collected from the last ten years, hang like windows opening onto Dodd's thinking and into her heart. Seeing through to things has been an enduring theme in her painting: what windows frame, how they shape, limit, focus, reflect or do not reflect, depending on whether they retain their glass panes, how they reject or welcome, distort, how they imply choice-to look or not to look. These windows, then, frame Dodd's views, actual and metaphorical. Lois Dodd as born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1927.  From 1945 to 1948 she attended The Cooper Union in New York.  In 1952 she was one of five artists to establish the Tanager Gallery, where she exhibited until 1962.  Her work has been exhibited at Colby College Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, List Gallery at Swarthmore College, Parrish Art Museum among many others.  A traveling retrospective of her work, 25 Years of Painting, was organized by the Montclair Art Museum in 1996.  Dodd taught at Brooklyn College, and has, since 1980, served on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.  She is an elected member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and National Academy of Design.  Dodd’s next exhibition at Alexandre Gallery is scheduled for February 2008.