By: Mark Jenkins
Installation of Lois Dodd: Mastering the Art of Direct Observation
THE ROCKY MAINE COAST is among the subjects illustrated in Lois Dodd's "Mastering the Art of Direct Observation," a show of pencil-and-watercolor landscapes and still lifes at Gallery Neptune & Brown. The 96-year-old artist also takes a topographic approach to the reclining female nude in three pictures that highlight peach-colored flesh with patches of blue and violet shadow.
Pink is not just for skin in these rarely exhibited drawing-paintings, made between 1964 and 1980. (There's also a wispy ink drawing from 2011.) Some of the boulders that frame an ocean inlet are rosy, as is a house that's defined as much by soft color as hard outlining. There's an architectonic quality as well to "Large Leaves," a closeup study of foliage in which pinkish light plays on one of the pale green leaves. The simple subject yields an intricate arrangement of lines and hues, suggesting the complexity visible in all things -- if only they're examined carefully.
Installation of Wolf Kahn: Luminous Landscapes
On the other side of the gallery are "Luminous Landscapes" by Wolf Kahn, Dodd's kindred spirit and near-neighbor. The German-born artist (1927-2020) summered for decades in Vermont, where he brought an abstractionist's brash sense of color to gentle landscapes.
These one-of-a-kind monotypes, made between 1987 and 2012, divide between horizontally and vertically focused compositions. The latter are defined by tree trunks that thrust almost the way from the bottom to the top of the pictures. Sideways swathes of red and magenta in such prints as "Outrageous Sunset" are the boldest element. But it's the jabbing gray and brown lines, distilling groves of trees into rudimentary strokes, that give the most notable pictures their appealing energy.