Lois Dodd is something of an icon in our household.  Neither Susan nor I can recall how we first came across her paintings, but sometime in the last twenty years we became somewhat obsessed with this now 98 year old American painter.  We own two of her works which we love to gaze at in our guest house in Vermont, and we’ve travelled to the Hall Foundation scarcely 10 miles from our home in Vermont, he Farnsworth Museum in Rochland, Maine, and galleries in New York City to see her work. Earlier this year we visited The Hague in the Netherlands to see the first European solo exhibition of her work.

“Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral” features a collection of essays and wonderfully rendered images of the 100 paintings in the Kunstmuseum show,  The 11 essays by critics, artists, and museum directors including Lucy Leppard and Hans Ulrich Obrist were interestng and informative.  The book  was a delight to leaf through, taking in the paintings, and reading about this fascinating woman.

Dodd is experiencing a late in life moment.  Born in Montclair, NJ and educated at Cooper Union, she labored for decades in relative obscurity painting scenes from nature, from her NYC apartment, her home in the Delaware Gap, and most of all from her environment around her simple home in Cushing, Maine—barns, trees, windows, flowers.  Representational painting in mid-20th century America, especially by a woman, was not in vogue, but Dodd soldiered on, and has finally begun to achieve the recognition she so richly deserves.

Her work is described as reflecting a life long practice of ‘attentiveness’ and ‘engagement with place’.  It shows a ‘remarkable consistency and inteegrity of vision, spare yet intuitive geometry and rhythm’ .  Perhaps her greatest accomplishment has been to show the power of painting as a sustained act of paying attention to the world.

If you don’t know her work, this monograph is a wonderful way to start or you can see the paintings in person at the Alexandre Gallery in New York City, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, or our guest house in Brownsville, Vermont.  I promise you that you will love them.