GREENWICH, Conn. — Passing between the two exhibitions inaugurating the new addition of the Bruce Museum, I was struck by the congruence in the artists’ interest in nearby worlds. At first glance, the luminous landscapes of Lois Dodd and the tiny, smudged drawings of James Castle couldn’t seem more different. Yet both artists worked with what was accessible: Castle at his home and studio in Idaho, and Dodd, for seven decades, in his own in Maine, New Jersey, and on the Lower East Side of New York, where she tours according to the seasons. Castle was relatively secluded, deaf and distant, while Dodd, though long under-recognized by the establishment, plied her trade in a community of artists. Unlike Castle, she got to know the art world. However, a persistent tranquility, a discretion permeates his work. The latticed windows she paints across the graveyard behind her Second Street studio indicate the occupation of a men’s shelter at night, but we never catch a glimpse of its inhabitants. She always seems alone. Moreover, she voluntarily resisted fashion. Her vision was stimulated by the ferment of New York Abstract Expressionism, which she admired and whose influence is evident in the early works exhibited. But, from the mid-1960s, when she first took her Masonite panels outside to paint, her output was shaped by observation: she often said, “I really saw that!
Lois Dodd: Natural Order is an important representation of 77 paintings. It is a reiteration, in part, of a fine exhibition last summer at the Hall Art Foundation in Vermont, which has many pieces on display, to which are added about thirty loans, all organized by subject: woodland scenes, night and interior landscapes, windows, flowers, clotheslines, city views. A few large nudes in the landscape are on display, and only three of her “Flashings” – quickly executed paintings on small, eminently portable aluminum roofing panels, which she produced by the dozens. It lacks some favorite subjects of the past, such as tunnel entrances built into the hillside along New Jersey roads, and a quarry in Maine where steep, geometric walls dappled with light provided an ideal structure for his effective brushwork. That she loves the brush and all the activity associated with it can be seen in “Self-portrait at the easel” (2010), where she represents herself and her tools in the form of a silhouette projected on the lawn, shaggy blades of grass. His gesture is exuberant.
Like this rare self-representation, most of the paintings here were made outside, a way of working inspired by his friend Alex Katz, who would make inroads into painting during the decade Dodd co-owned a home with him and his then-wife, artist Jean Cohen, in the Maine. Dodd always made reference to nature in his works, even in those made at the beginning, based on drawings. Once she went out to paint, she never looked back. She no longer had, as she maintains, to struggle to find a subject; however complex the scene, she found the point of view that allowed her to summarize and abstract the essential. And so he went, to the point of such remarkable consistency that it is difficult to consider his art in strictly chronological order – although she tended to increase the distillation, the elimination of all the unnecessary details, as she gets older. The show’s most recent work, the small “Tree in Snowstorm” (2021), in a palette as modest in tone as its subject, is a single bare tree accumulating the snowflakes flying all around, expressing apart equal solitude and simple, mute eloquence.
Dodd prefers less flexible surfaces — for some of the larger works, it’s stretched linen. Smaller works on Masonite were completed in one go, before the lighting and atmospheric conditions changed too much, but some of the larger works, such as in a series done in the woods, were painted over days. , causing him to tie his web to a tree. , cover it and come back several times until it’s done. Among the most striking series are her windows, which she began painting in Maine in 1968 and proved to be enduring as a subject. Struck by what she calls our “American ruins,” exemplified by abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings, she found herself fascinated by the combination of grid structure and reflective randomness in their broken windows. In “View Through Elliot’s Shack Looking North” (1971), we simultaneously see what lies behind us, on the surface, within or beyond, glimpsed through a broken window on the other side of the shack. . Everything is flattened in the image plane. Note here “Barn Window and White Square” (1981), with its rhythmic geometry, and “Self Portrait in Green House Window” (1971), on loan from the Portland Museum of Art. In this one, one of her very rare self-portraits, she depicts herself in communion with a cheerful goldenrod. She must have reflected herself often in the windows, but she carefully excludes herself most of the time; she paints what she sees, but selectively, after all.
Many of these beautiful monumental works are in the exhibition, but my favorites are the winter and night landscapes, in which what Dodd sees becomes almost visionary, in the manner of, say, Arthur Dove or Charles Burchfield. In the night sky, the moon is surrounded by an immense and delicate ring, an evanescent atmospheric effect (“Moon Ring”, 1982). In early spring ponds, melting ice creates shapes within which reflections present alternate worlds (“Opening in Ice and Light on Path”, 2002). Shadows and silhouettes of all kinds come to life at night or on winter days, when they can, in strange or phantasmagorical forms, populate the roads dazzled by the headlights or turn blue and spindly in the whiteness, as in the exquisite ‘Tree Shadow on Snow’ (1995), depicting a snowdrift at the Delaware Water Gap. Its summer landscapes, dominated by green, are just as captivating. Arriving in Maine one spring when the trees were still in bloom, she created her monumental “Apple Tree and Shed” (2007), contrasting white, globular treetops with the funky straightness of a small outbuilding.
Hanging next to this impressive work is the unassuming ‘Green Towel’ (1980), essentially a green monochrome. His subject hanging from a clothesline casts a shadow on the flattened lawn – a curved, fractured parallelogram – that gives the certainty of a towel flapping in the breeze. Painting is simple, safe and fast. Such works, born of both Dodd’s intimate love for nature and his sharp, analytical eye, allow us to contemplate the changing effects of light and time, and with them a world that too often slips beneath. our own concern.
