Lois Dodd has spent more than seventy years attentively observing her surroundings – both natural and architectural - translating them onto canvas. Her quintessentially American paintings recount a life spent working with her medium outdoors, much of it in the Delaware Water Gap and the bucolic settings around her summer home in Midcoast Maine. Influenced by principles of observed natural light and repeated looking that characterise the work of artists such as Edward Hopper and Paul Cézanne, Dodd quickly adopted a subdued palette, and a shorthand of synoptic brushstrokes and economical paint applications. Although much of her oeuvre is oriented towards the details and scale of the natural landscape, it also manages to draw out the unexpected beauty and enigma camouflaged in the ordinary aspects of everyday life, such as the perspective and colour offered in a glance through an open door; the play of light and shadow on a washing line; the understated texture and atmosphere of the view through a window onto a pale sky; along with more dramatic nocturnal scenes and burning houses. Dodd has garnered much attention for her long standing series of works portraying windows, which at once suggest a kind of Hitchcockian voyeurism and at the same time quiet meditations on opacity. Dodd’s observational painting over the years has become an ode to the natural world’s short-term flux and long-term rhythms, whether it is witnessed directly or through panes of glass. Consistent throughout her work, however, is the affirmation that she is not striving for illusion, but instead interested in the material, concrete reality of the world as seen through paint.

Lois Dodd was born in 1927 in Montclair, New Jersey, and attended Cooper Union in New York from 1945 to 1948, where she studied textile design. In 1952 she co-founded the artist-run Tanager Gallery, one of the now-legendary 10th Street cooperatives. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States, including Ogunquit Museum of American Art (2018); Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville (2014); Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick (2004); Montclair Art Museum, (1996); and Dartmouth College, Hanover (1990). A retrospective organised in 2012 by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, travelled to Portland Museum of Art the following year. Dodd’s paintings are held in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Portland Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.