Artist Conversation: Lois Dodd and Eve Aschheim

The painter Lois Dodd (b. 1927 and raised in Montclair, New Jersey) is known for making landscape new by finding poignant moments of beauty in the everyday—colorful laundry hanging on a line, views through broken windows, a close-up of a dandelion bloom or condensation on a window—in contrast with the avant-garde who found the new by rejecting the ordinary in search of the transcendental. Remarkably, Dodd found a way to reinvent painting within a circumscribed life, painting directly from observation at or near her homes in Maine, New York City, and Blairstown, NJ.

Dodd will be in conversation with Eve Aschheim, artist and lecturer in visual arts at the Lewis Center for the Arts. They will discuss Dodd’s imagery, how she identifies scenes to paint, her framing and compositional adjustments, her attention to light, and the geometry and abstraction she incorporates, illustrated by original photographs. Dodd will describe the experience of painting directly in the landscape—for example, standing in the snow for hours at the Delaware Water Gap. She will also elaborate on specific works from her recent major gift of twenty-eight drawings and watercolors to the Princeton University Art Museum.

Moderated by Laura Giles, Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr., Class of 1970, Curator of Prints and Drawings.