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Lois Dodd’s paintings ‘Blowing Laundry,’ a 1980 watercolor in the Princeton University Art Museum collection.

‘The Painted Room,’ 1982, oil on linen in the collection of the Farnsworth Museum in Maine.

The soon-to-be 95-year-old artist Lois Dodd in her Blairstown studio.

The soon-to-be 95-year-old artist Lois Dodd in her Blairstown studio.

It was a few years ago, before the Princeton University Museum closed for its renovations, and I was rushing through the downstairs display of recently acquired artwork on my way to an exhibition on the second floor.

While I glanced at the artwork and determined to come back to visit another time, I was focused and didn’t want to be distracted. Yet as I headed up the stairs, a simple arrangement of soft colored squares grabbed my attention.

Suddenly I was staring at what ostensibly was a series of sheets but really something else — an arrangement appealing to something outside of words but related to something found in poetry.

I then looked at the museum label and saw that the work was a by contemporary artist Lois Dodd, whose recent New York City gallery show was on the New York Times list of “Most Memorable Art and Image-Makers of 2021.”

Another New York Times article, a review of an exhibition in Maine, called attention to her subject matter: “landscapes, interiors and river views; of flowers, garden sheds and lawns; of compact clapboard houses and barns, by the light of the moon or sun; of wood-slat doors and steep farmhouse steps; and, quite often, of reflection-catching four-pane windows.”

The reviewer then noted that while the above “may sound conventional, even pedestrian, but the paintings hold your attention. Many seem at first glance slightly unnerving: awkward, brusque or even unfinished. While they seduce the eye with light and color, they challenge it with an assortment of brush strokes, spatial complexities and compositional quirks, teetering in different ways on the cusp between abstract and representational. Behind their veneer of homey familiarity, these paintings are tough and unruly. Their main attitude seems to be a blithe, independent-spirit.”

Closer to the U.S. 1 region, Dodd was the recent subject of a Zoom conference organized by the Princeton University Art Museum on the occasion of her gift of 28 works and the exhibition “Painting the Moon and Beyond: Lois Dodd and Friends” currently on view at Trenton City Museum through April 29.

I first became aware of the artist, who turns 95 on April 22, during a Trenton City Museum exhibition in the 1990s. In addition to being a respected and innovative artist, she had also connected to another generation of artists through her years as a member of the art faculty at Brooklyn College.

Since Mercer County Community College faculty members respected Dodd’s work as both artist and instructor, numerous regional artists also studied art with her. That included then-TCM director Terry McNichol.

I then reconnected with Dodd a decade or so later when my wife, Liz Roszel, curated a show at the Prince Street Gallery in New York City.

Dodd, who has a studio in New York City, was making her usual rounds to area galleries to see what artists were doing and to stay current.

Several years later my wife and I visited Dodd at her summer home in Maine, where she started painting with a group of young artists in the 1950s.

I am also in contact with other artists who have a connection with Dodd and are also in the TCM show. That includes artist Mel Leipzig, whose painting of Lois Dodd in her studio is part of the TCM exhibition and, according curator Ilene Dube, was the catalyst for it.

Lois Dodd’s paintings ‘Blowing Laundry,’ a 1980 watercolor in the Princeton University Art Museum collection.

Recently, I met with Dodd at her Blairstown, New Jersey, home to discuss her art, career, the Princeton gift, and the Trenton exhibition. She purchased the 19th century building in the 1960s when she was working for a college program at the Delaware River Water Gap and saw it as a place close to New York City where she could work outdoors when not in Maine. It also marks the artist’s connection to her home state.

The artist, born in 1927 in Montclair, says that as young girl she thought that she would follow her widowed father’s career in the Merchant Marines. “I thought I‘d grow up to be a sea captain,” she says.

Her world changed when her father was killed during a German attack on his ship during the early years of World War II.

The youngest of four daughters was then raised by the eldest sister and supported by her father’s insurance and forward thinking. “He fixed it so we could stay at the house,” she says.

Dodd says that while her parents were not artistic, she found she had a talent that attracted attention and offered her a path.

“Staring very early on when you discover that you can do something better than others and you keep doing it and it became the major life line,” she says.

Dodd attended Montclair High School, where she says she benefited from its strong art program, good facilities, and supportive faculty, including a young female teacher who told her and other students about various art schools in New York City.

One of the schools was the noted Cooper Union. Dodd says she another student were accepted and in addition to taking the expected classes in design, anatomy for drawing, and painting, she also learned to make paint.

The trip from Montclair to New York City also seems to sharpen her senses. “It was a nice trip every day,” she says, “the train to Hoboken and ferry across the river and going up to city hall and then taking the subway. I remember the Hudson River in the winter when it froze and it was filled with chunks of ice; it was exciting.”

Originally Dodd had thought about a career in textile design, and after an unsuccessful attempt to sell designs to textile houses and unsettled about tedious practices related to color separation, she joined with artists friends also finding their way.

One was going to Maine for summer studies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture where she and her then husband, sculptor Bill King, and artists Jean and Alex Katz would rent school owned cottages after their studies.

“That’s how Maine got in the picture. After being students, we thought it was great. We just couldn’t not go back. And Maine was a lot cheaper than going to Cape Cod or Rhode Island.”

When King received a Fulbright Scholarship, he and Dodd went to Italy, where they met other New York artists. Then, she says, “When we came back (to the City), we’d get together. We missed Rome and we asked should we open a coffeehouse or gallery?

“It was perfectly clear that we weren’t going to get into (more established) galleries on 57th street, the gallery was more practical.” Or as a New York Times article on the gallery founding put it, the artists realized “that the smug New York gallery scene was almost solely devoted to European abstraction and American Regionalism.”

Originally opening on East Fourth Street in a former barber shop, the Tanager Gallery took its name from the orange glass that was over the doorway and reminded one of the founders of the color of a scarlet tanager bird.

After its move to 10th Street, it became, according to Smithsonian Museum’s Archives of American Art, “one of the first artist cooperatives formed on 10th Street to provide an alternative to the larger upscale galleries of Madison Avenue.”

“It was a good gallery and got a good reputation,” says Dodd matter-of-factly. “We made a decision that we didn’t want to just show our own work. We wanted to show others who were good. We went to their studios and to see the work it was very exciting.”

Saying that it had the learning curve of an MFA program, Dodd says she learned about “who we going to show and getting reviewers to come,” including a young Hilton Kramer, who wrote about the gallery before he became a writer for the New York Times as its preeminent art critic.

Dodd adds that with the addition of other galleries, including the HANSA and BRATA galleries, “Soon 10th Street was filled with artist galleries, all artist-run. We had openings on Tuesday nights. Then someone said, ‘Why don’t we all do it on Friday nights? And it got very lively.”

A catalog for New York University’s Gray Gallery 2017 exhibition, “Inventing Downtown,” noted that the Tanager and others galleries that opened “between the apex of abstract expressionism and the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism” had “shaped American art irreversibly”

And while the artists may have started a movement, it missed on something else. “In 10 years, maybe we sold one piece of art,” says Dodd, touching on the reality that creating and selling art are two different realms.

Dodd’s direction in art was shaped by personal, external, and temporal factors.

“How could I do what is not uniquely me? You have no control over who you are, so whatever comes out of it is already there.

‘The Painted Room,’ 1982, oil on linen in the collection of the Farnsworth Museum in Maine.

“It’s a surprise to me what I do, too. I think that’s why people paint. When you first start painting you try to project on it. It is more now to work and see what you do. It is a surprise, a revelation. You develop a point of view of going along of what comes out and follow that. As long as you go with the flow, so to speak, it’s good

“I discovered somewhere along the line that I wasn’t a figure painter. I had a friend who had a model and said ‘you said you could paint.’ I went over. Oh my god, it was agonizing. I hated every minute it. I wasn’t painting that way — the beauty of the nude figure. I didn’t realize that until I tried to do it. I felt inept. It’s very strange when you stumble what the right thing you do you can paint.”

Referring to herself as a reporter, Dodd finds inspiration in the phenomenon of the everyday “things connected to time and light.”

“What you see is momentary in a sense and it may not be that way the next day or next week. Things repeat but not really. I remember driving along and seeing a spot and thinking I have to come back and paint it. And I’d go back it wasn’t there. So, all these things are connected to time and light.”

About her approach, Dodd says, “I don’t have a style. I paint.” And while neither a total realistic or abstract painter, she admits that sometimes certain influences would shade her thinking, citing Cezanne as one example.

She also says while she would “kind of pick up” ideas, her “work never got to look like someone else’s. I don’t have the skill to imitate that well. (And) if anyone said ‘you should do this or this,’ I couldn’t.”

Looking at the various art movements from the 1940s to the present, Dodd says there have been “new looks and new characters” that come and go, but touch everyone’s artwork, including hers, and “denotes a real era in time.”

She also has been consistent with her media, favoring oil, water painting, and drawing over acrylic paint and new media. She also prefers hard surfaces. In addition to linen that stretches tight on the frame, she likes to use Masonite panels for outdoor work because they are sturdy, light, inexpensive, and can be easily tossed away if need be. The same with a relatively new choice of “canvas,” roof flashes, the small aluminum panels used under shingles to prevent leaking. She says she learned about them from a student.

Moving to the business side of art, Dodd says the challenge facing all artists is “how you going to make a living?”

Despite her pioneering efforts at the Tanager Gallery, Dodd says after it closed in 1962 she waited seven years for her next exhibition. It was organized by artist Lucian Day, who founded a new gallery in Greenwich Village that eventually became known as Green Mountain Gallery.

She says Green Mountain represented her for 10 years before she joined the Fischbach Gallery. She began her partnership with her current New York gallery, Alexandre, in 2003.

While her art was becoming the subject of various group and individual exhibitions and part of the permanent collections of numerous museums — including MoMA, the Metropolitan, and Whitney in New York City — the separated mother of a son supported herself by teaching.

She says just at the point where she was unsure of how to continue, Brooklyn College art instructor and Tanager Gallery exhibitor Philip Pearlstein contacted her to teach. “They didn’t have a lot of women teaching at the colleges, and it was great,” says Dodd, adding that to be successful in the arts, “You can’t be an isolated figure. You have to have friends, compatriots, and associates in the same field.”

Dodd’s connection to others is the link to her presence in the Princeton/Trenton region.

Regarding her work becoming part of the PUAM collection, Dodd says, “I have a friend who teaches there in art department, Eve Aschheim. Somehow. It came up at some point where I was asked if I’d want to give the museum something, and I gave them the drawings. It was all kind of casual.” Dodd said she assembled “a pile” of art and let the museum curator go through it.

The works, including the drawings that grabbed my attention, and a video recorded discussion can be seen on the museum site.

TCM exhibit curator Ilene Dube — also regionally known for articles for several publications including U.S. 1 — says her interest in Dodd was piqued when she encountered a painting of the artist by her friend, nationally known Trenton artist Mel Leipzig, which is also part of the TCM exhibition.

“I wanted to get to know her work better,” says Dube via an exhibition statement. “I wanted to get to know this figure who’d played a significant role in the downtown gallery scene of 1950s New York and who, as a nonagenarian, continues to make paintings that enamor legions around the world. Soon I learned that she was a catalyst for a group of artists who would go outside in the wee hours to paint, capturing the ethereal magic of Maine at night” — and providing the thematic name for the exhibition.

In addition to Dodd, three artists in that above mentioned group are also represented: Jeff Epstein, a Trenton-born artist now living in Brooklyn and Maine; Dan Finaldi, a high school art teacher living in Highland Park, New Jersey; and Elizabeth O’Reilly, an Irish-born artist also living in Brooklyn. All three were also students of the artist at Brooklyn College.

During my recent visit, Dodd took me to her second-floor studio, where the bright winter light illuminated an easel bearing one of Dodd’s works in progress.

And while it seems to be just a small painting with trees, it also contains several eras of art, a world of techniques that range from fine art to textile design, and the instinct of an artist who helped spark New York City’s art scene.

And if Dodd says her works are “more than a landscape,” it’s simply because they contain a life and soul.

For more on Lois Dodd, visit her gallery page at www.alexandregallery.com/lois-dodd.

Click the links to see the PUAM’s collection of Lois Dodd’s work and the conversation between Dodd and Eve Aschheim.

And to see her work, visit “Painting the Moon and Beyond: Lois Dodd and Friends” at the Trenton City Museum, Cadwalader Park, Trenton Currently on view and closing with a reception on April 30. Friday and Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. Free. 609-989-3632 or www.ellarslie.org.

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