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.
Dried Maple Leaf, 2024, oil on Masonite, 14 x 16 inches
Oak Leaf + Tree Trunk, 2024, oil on Masonite, 16 x 11 7/8 inches
Teazle, 2024, oil on Masonite, 20 x 11 7/8 inches
Maple Leaf, 2023, oil on Masonite, 12 x 14 inches
Dried Pods, 2022, oil on panel, 16 x 13 inches
Oak Leaf, 2022, oil on Masonite, 20 1/4 x 11 inches
Arbor Vitae + Bill's House in Jan., 2021, oil on Masonite, 11 7/8 x 18 inches
Elm Tree in December, 2020, oil on Masonite, 16 x 12 inches
Elm Tree Branches and Sky, 2020, oil on Masonite, 16 3/4 x 20 inches
View Across High St., 2019, oil on Masonite, 16 x 16 inches
Outhouse + Tree, October, 2017, oil on Masonite, 18 3/4 x 12 7/8 inches
Edge of Barn + Elliott's Woods, 2017, oil on Masonite, 19 1/2 x 20 inches
Amaryllis, 2010, oil on Masonite, 11 7/8 x 19 inches
Straight on View, 2009, oil on Masonite, 17 1/8 x 16 inches
Amaryllis, 2009, oil on Masonite, 10 7/8 x 14 7/8 inches
Forsythia, 2005, oil on wood panel, 8 x 14 3/4 inches
Iris Bud, Spring '06, 2006, oil on Masonite, 16 x 9 1/2 inches
Spring, 2005, oil on wood panel, 11 x 18 3/8 inches
View into Barn, April, 2000, oil on Masonite, 14 x 18 inches
View thru Empty Building (Bakery), 2001, oil on wood panel, 12 x 19 3/4 inches
VT Barn – Open, 1990, oil on wood panel, 19 x 14 3/4 inches
Behind Kreeger's Barn, 1986, oil on Masonite, 14 x 12 inches
Newton, NJ, Nov., 1983, oil on Masonite, 11 3/4 x 12 inches
Fallscape, Looking Up - Back of House, 1985, oil on panel, 10 x 10 inches
Forsythia, 1980, oil on Masonite, 15 3/4 x 13 inches
Red Laundry + Window Frame, 1980, oil on Masonite, 25 1/4 x 17 inches
Oak in Winter, 1976, oil on Masonite, 20 x 18 inches
Knotweed Leaf A, 2020, oil on aluminum flashing, 5 x 7 inches
Unidentified Plant, 2020, oil on aluminum flashing, 5 x 7 inches
Grass with Spiderwebs, 2018, oil on aluminum flashing, 5 x 7 inches
Flower on Blue Ground, 2018, oil on aluminum flashing, 5 x 7 inches
Road at Night, 2003, oil on aluminum flashing, 7 x 5 inches
Chenille Plant, Sept., 1993, oil on aluminum flashing, 5 x 7 inches
