Lois Dodd
For over fifty years Dodd (American, b. 1927) has painted her immediate everyday surroundings at the places she has chosen to live and work – the Lower East Side, rural Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. Dodd’s small, intimately-scaled paintings are almost always completed in one plein-air sitting. Her subjects include rambling New England out buildings, lush summer gardens, dried leafless plants, nocturnal moonlit skies and views through interior windows. She often returns to familiar motifs repeatedly at different times of the year with dramatically varied results.
The critic Roberta Smith wrote in March 2013: “Ms. Dodd loves the observed world, the vagaries of nature and the specificities of old Maine houses: the way they cleave to the ground, or fill a picture frame, or shine, lights on or off, in the moonlight. She always searches out the underlying geometry but also the underlying life, and the sheer strangeness of it all.”
Lois Dodd studied at the Cooper Union in the late 1940s. In 1952 she was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, among the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of over fifty one-person exhibitions. In 2012, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a retrospective of Dodd’s work which traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. In 2017 she was the subject of a monograph published by Lund Humphries with text by Faye Hirsch.
Motherwort, 2018, oil on Masonite, 21 1/2 x 12 inches
Silver Sage, 2004, oil on Masonite, 11 7/8 x 11 7/8 inches
Pink Geranium, 2011, oil on Masonite, 9 x 7 1/4 inches
Tunnel at Vail in Snow, 1978, oil on Masonite, 15 x 18 inches
Driveway in Feb., 2004, oil on Masonite, 10 x 18 inches
Sun Reflection Blair Pond, 2003, oil on Masonite, 10 x 15 1/2 inches
Brook & Shadows, 2000, oil on Masonite, 18 x 11 inches
Land House and Trees, 1994, oil on Masonite, 8 x 11 inches
Vermont Road, 1988, oil on Masonite, 22 x 12 inches
Eucomis, 2018, oil on Masonite, 20 x 10 inches
Branch of Dried Leaves, 2022, oil on panel, 15 3/4 x 5 inches
18 Leaves and Sky, 2022, oil on wood panel, 16 x 8 inches
January Night, 1980, oil on Masonite, 20 x 18 3/4 inches
Arbor Vitae + Bill's House in Jan., 2021, oil on Masonite, 11 7/8 x 18 inches
Arbor Vitae + Bill's Cottage, 2021, oil on Masonite, 12 1/8 x 12 1/8 inches
Behind Kreeger's Barn, 1986, oil on Masonite, 14 x 12 inches
Blue Iris, 2013, oil on Masonite, 17 x 15 inches
Amaryllis, 2010, oil on wooden panel, 7 7/8 x 7 7/8 inches
Lilac in September, 2010, oil on Masonite, 12 1/8 x 11 1/4 inches
Fallscape, Looking Up - Back of House, 1985, oil on panel, 10 x 10 inches
Hedgerow & Trees, Fall, 1989, oil on Masonite, 14 x 13 3/4 inches
Ice Flows at Water Gap, 1981, oil on Masonite, 12 x 12 inches
View Across Delaware, 1995, oil on Masonite, 20 x 20 inches
Butternut Tree, 1988, oil on wood panel, 10 x 14 inches
Green Composition, 2009, oil on Masonite, 12 x 15 7/8 inches
Garden (Purple Iris), 1997, oil on wooden panel, 11 x 11 inches
Black Cohosh Bloom, 2018, oil on Masonite, 11 x 17 inches
Monarda, 2006, oil on Masonite, 17 1/8 x 11 inches
Queen of the Prairie, 2004, oil on Masonite, 20 x 10 inches
Cow Parsnip In Bud, 2011, oil on Masonite, 20 1/8 x 13 inches
Leslie's Garden in Winter, 1983, oil on Masonite, 19 x 20 inches
Road into the Park, 1977, oil on wooden panel, 14 x 17 3/4 inches
Rhubarb Leaves and Shadow, 2004, oil on Masonite, 16 x 20 inches
Dandelions, 2005, oil on wooden panel, 8 7/8 x 18 1/4 inches
