The Brooklyn Rail

Lois Dodd’s show Outside In opened on the first real snowfall of the season, and both her new paintings and the melting flurries were a reminder of the agency involved in seeing—the muscle required to shift focus between objects and sort the flux of the world into something familiar. Blizzard Cushing (2021), a winter view from the artist’s studio in Maine, was hung next to the gallery’s windows, and its specks of snow mirrored those outside catching the day’s fading gray. It is hard enough to describe snow with words, let alone pigment; so the strength of Dodd’s painting is that her flurries are made of thinned dabs of purplish-gray oil, not white, disappearing into a dark sky and reappearing against branches and gleaming snow banks. To see weather as a shadow on the landscape, and to be able to transmit its immediacy through a much slower action of the wrist, is the mark of Dodd’s decades spent looking and disassembling. There is another painting of a flowering apple tree against a roiling field of grass—her trees feel like portraits—its blooms fusing into a craggy patch of white. It is like first stepping outdoors from a dim interior, the sun’s light suddenly painful past that threshold. But Dodd has made that temporary scene monumental, so that we can look at the feeling of eyes opening up to the world, the strain of a bright formation surrounded by lushness.

The brunt of Dodd’s work is a matter-of-fact transcription from the eye to the hand: in Tree (2019), a smeared diagonal stroke traces the eye panning across a branch, and another stroke, replenished with a deeper brown, returns to the same line. There is a rhythm of pupil and wrist in those skeletal shapes, foreground and background approaching each other and meeting in unfussed nudges along an edge vibrating with glances back and forth: tree, palette, brush, blur, tree—limb limning limb. The filling in, what feels so much like illumination, is as important as the sketching out. Dodd’s fidelity is to the arm as arbiter, to believing the hand’s sensation just as much as the eye, and trusting the fingers to let air in. That articulation is not necessarily operating against style, but straddles impressionism and realism, mediating the equivalent forces of joy and diligence.

For joy, look at the cascading umber shadow in White Pine Cone (2022), or the edges in Plant Study (2021) and the way that the neutral background pushes up against the gleaming buds like the polished surface of a medieval enamel. For diligence, see the furled lower leaf in Mayberry (2023), which is built with earth reds, viridian, ochres, pinks, and grays. I assume that Dodd would claim no difference between those two modes of working. Her paintings are agitated around the limits between restraint and pleasure, as in another painting of a pinecone, this time viewed from the top and intensely foreshortened. There is a moment far from the carefully observed center where you realize she has stopped painting the individual scales of the pinecone and is instead using the previously mixed grays and highlights to block out a pattern against the underlying wash of brown. It is not a shortcut, but rather a way of dealing with the strange effects of peripheral vision, which neither camera nor pencil can resolve.

In this grouping of panels, all made in the last four years, it’s possible to trace visual affinities through Dodd’s hand. There is a pair of views out of the Maine barn studio window, separated by a year and painted in radically different light conditions. Notice, in Barn Window Closed (2019), that the window’s mullion casts a green shadow on the landscape beyond, its skittering abstraction unfolding like an atlas. In Barn Window + Apple Tree Leaves (2020), the foliage is more closely described, and the outlines of its leaves create a scaly texture not unlike that found on Dodd’s 2023 study of an Osage orange. There is also Birch Bark (2021), a closeup of the tree’s peeled bark against the grass, its white borders reading from afar as an ice floe, and the cracks of the bark rendered in simple vertical and horizontal strokes like symbols of faraway trees, a macro view hinting at a map.

Of course, all of Dodd’s work is a map of where her hand has landed in response to her eye. The difference is not so much between topography and horizontality, but between a survey and an elegy, in that Dodd’s subjects are fleeting, or at least in the middle of changing. We get to measure her trees and windows season by season, decade by decade. But the only measurements that matter, in the moment, are a length of brown along a split log, or the short yellow spray of November foliage, the way that a calculated rotation of the wrist turns a shadow into a blade of grass.