Lois Dodd at Alexandre and the New York Studio School

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Robert Berlind

In her show at Alexandre--several dozen small landscapes done on masonite panels or plywood over the past 12 years--Lois Dodd made the art of painting seem easy, as natural as telling a friend about something surprising you have noticed on a walk. Her content consists largely of those intimate epiphanies granted to the visually prepared. Describing resplendent autumn foliage, a nocturnal view, forsythia in the snow, a gaggle of chickens or laundry drying on a clothesline, she renders fragmentary views with emblematic clarity.

In Cows, Ireland (1995), she lays down black and white shapes and whatever else is found behind the quick arcs of tangled, bare trees in the foreground--and to, those five Holsteins appear in all their bovine stillness. The offhandedness of their rendering, especially the two at the lower right, gives them just the necessary degree of presence in relation to the overall focus of the picture. Here, as in all the works included in the show, Dodd's brushwork, stroked, dabbed or scumbled over a white or tinted ground and always visible, establishes forthrightly two-dimensional shapes throughout the painting, rather than articulating the structure of three-dimensional forms in space. But her subjects spring to life as we look--or even, one might say, through the agency of our looking.

A modernist tendency toward geometry shows itself in her unwavering tree trunks, architectural elements and long, straight shadows, as well as in the underlying construction of her compositions. Such geometry and abbreviated descriptions are intended not so much to stylize the subject as to establish the painterly equivalent of plain speech. Dodd works within the vernacular American tradition that encompasses Milton Avery and Fairfield Porter, as well as William Carlos Williams. One feels that she downplays detailed, literal description not out of some modernist imperative but, as the Shaker hymn puts it, because she has "a gift to be simple" and, with that temperamental dispensation, "a gift to be free." In playing this improvisational, on-site game, she knows just when to stop--a sure sign of grace.

The New York Studio School showed Dodd's figurative work--paintings on panels and works on paper depicting nudes in sunny settings. These pictures sometimes include images of other artists working from the figure and recall Avery's outdoor sketch-class works in their apparent casualness and their often schematic anatomies. [This exhibition debuted at the Banana Factory, Binney & Smith Gallery in Bethlehem, Pa., traveled to Dartmouth College's Hopkins Center (Aug. 3-29) and will close at Lynchburg College's Daura Center (Oct. 22-Dec. 13).]

--Robert Berlind