LOIS DODD at KINGSBOROUGH COMMUNITY COLLEGE

by Robert Sievert

Lois Dodd's exhibit at Kingsborough is a show of major works done by the artist over the last twenty years. All these paintings are large and show the careful craft and insight of an artist in prime form.

Her style flattens out large masses and creates tattoos of form defining lines across them. This is most apparent in her Quarry pictures from the nineties in which she paints stone cliffs of pink and yellow stone reflected in water. The play between complicated space and abstraction of nature give these paintings power

Her "deep woods" paintings (Morning Woods and Morning Woods/Back of Canvas) are testament to her neat and clear definition of complicated spaces. The three varied elements of this work are the forest floor (a sweeping retreating plane), the trees(a vertical staggered setting that draws you into the deep recesses of the woods), and the green canopy to which the other two elements are anchored. Light plays a pivotal part in this work. Color achieves the subtle differences of the random light of the wooded interior.as morning light enters the forest and makes its way through the trees The play of light across this wooded area is true.

Light is perhaps the strongest element in her studio interiors whose painterly effects cast a spell. So much is said with so little. The studio's interior is all white. The paintings are almost all white and variant shades of white. The only color in these pictures is in the random objects that Dodd has used to create the space: the back of a chair becomes the frontal plane while the rest of the room falls back> a mirror. These canvases create a pristine economical space whose color or lack of it conveys luminosity.

Too bad some of her earlier Studio interiors of the seventies are not included in this show. In these earlier works the color really achieves luminosity as one sees light from other rooms penetrating the studio through warm oranges and yellows.