She drains the terrible scene of histrionics and elevates it into something concerning but calm, quiet, almost ineluctable. And yet Dodd manages to give this picture a foursquare, almost archetypal quality. Few things, at least on a local scale, are more dramatic. Her paintings are highly considered reductions, as concerned with what is best left out as what to include.Ī house on fire is a hectic scene. But she also invents and - even more important - omits. Her art is rooted in close and patient observation. It’s not Dodd’s style to cook things up out of nothing. Nor do I know if Dodd was painting from her imagination or recording an actual event - although I would wager the latter. I assume Dodd gave the release a green light, but I can find no other evidence of political intention in her work. The gallery’s news release noted that the series was painted “during the final years of the Bush Presidency,” inviting viewers to read the works as some kind of political commentary. It formed part of a suite of six large paintings, all depicting a blazing rural house. This mysterious painting at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, was first exhibited in a 2009 show at the Alexandre gallery in New York. Why, then, if she’s such a quietist, did she paint a house on fire? She is a poet of windows and reflections of houses and shacks in Maine of quarries, iced-over ponds and flowers: cow parsnips, red gladioli, globe thistles, wild geraniums. Dodd, 95, is the subject of an overview of her long and splendid career at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. She paints, instead, stillness and silence, always in a stripped-back style notable for its acute perceptiveness and absence of fussiness.
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