For over fifty years Dodd (American, b. 1927) has painted her immediate everyday surroundings at the places she has chosen to live – the Lower East Side, Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. Her subjects include rambling New England out buildings, lush summer gardens, dried leafless plants, icy ponds, nocturnal moonlight skies and views through windows and doorways. She often returns to her familiar motifs repeatedly at different times of the year, in different light and weather, and with dramatically varied results. Her compositions are graphically distilled, betray little mark of era and are curiously timeless. It has been said that her work is an example of New England simplicity, like Shaker furniture or small-town eighteenth century churches.

On the occasion of Dodd’s 2012 – 2013 traveling retrospective Catching the Light (organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art), the Times critic Roberta Smith wrote:

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 shear strangeness of it all.

The curator Alison Ferris noted in the Kemper catalogue:

Dodd’s gift to us in her paintings is the opportunity to pause in a world fraught with nonstop frenetic energies. We can escape from the ordeals of modern life to places like Maine, where nature appears to offer the potential of transformation. But transformation, Dodd shows us, is not intrinsically related to place, but rather, is possible in what we make of our extraordinary, if sometimes mundane, everyday world.

In endorsing the new Lund Humphries book the art historian Irving Sandler writes:

In the late 1950s Lois Dodd decided that Abstract Expressionism painting had been enervated. She felt that a new direction was needed and she met that challenge by making her figurative painting more factual. Her rendering of rural Maine opened a fresh chapter in the long distinguished history of American scene painting. These developments are superbly chronicled in Faye Hirsch’s monograph on Lois Dodd

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 sixty one-person exhibitions.

The new Lund Humphries publication Lois Dodd is available for order through the gallery website, direct from the publisher or other on-line booksellers and includes 100 color plates over 144 pages.