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.
White Pine Cone on Windowsill, 2025, oil on Masonite, 12 x 20 inches
Oak Leaf + Tree Trunk, 2024, oil on Masonite, 16 x 11 7/8 inches
Adjacent Roofs, 2024, oil on Masonite, 15 x 15 3/4 inches
Fall Leaves, Blue Sky, 2024, oil on Masonite, 16 x 20 inches
Queen Anne's Lace, Backview of Head, 2018, oil on Masonite, 11 x 12 inches
Clapboards, Chimney + Branches, 2018, oil on Masonite, 17 x 8 1/2 inches
Night Hollyhock, 2016, oil on Masonite, 18 x 12 inches
Pink Shirt + Green Towel on Line, 2014, oil on Masonite, 16 x 18 inches
Amaryllis, 2009, oil on Masonite, 10 7/8 x 14 7/8 inches
Window, Reflections, Yellow House, 2001, oil on Masonite, 19 3/4 x 10 inches
View Across Delaware, 1995, oil on Masonite, 20 x 20 inches
Foxgloves, 1987, oil on Masonite, 20 x 13 inches
The Brook in January, 1986, oil on Masonite, 14 x 14 inches
Tar Paper House, 1983, oil on Masonite, 20 x 20 inches
Sun Pattern, 1981, oil on Masonite, 15 3/4 x 12 inches
Laundry, Belvedere, 1980, oil on Masonite, 17 x 18 inches
Green Towel, 1978, oil on linen, 36 x 34 inches
Road from Salamovka in Snow, 1976, oil on linen, 20 x 18 inches
Empty Window, Black, 1979, oil on Masonite, 16 x 18 inches
Night View at Vail, 1977, oil on Masonite, 12 x 21 inches
Woods (Triptych), 1975 oil on linen, 169 x 36 inches
Window - Cityscape, Oval Mirror, 1972-73, oil on linen, 48 x 40 inches
Cows in a Field, 1959, oil on linen, 27 x 35 inches
