Lois Dodd’s “White Catastrophe” is an oil painting on panel about 18 inches square. Typical of her daily plein air work, it is a relatively simple scene rendered in a lightly loose hand. In front of a background of a flat purple-distanced house and deep green shrubbery, the scene features a white sheet hung out on the line that has been awakened by a gust of wind. The relationship of the sheet to the chartreuse-verdant ground has been animated by the relationship between the sheet’s shadow and the billowing white form – which has taken the shape of a large wobbly paper airplane coming in for a crash landing.

The oncoming muddiness is subtly (but sufficiently) portended by a brick-red brown passage that seems to be pushing the folded sheet toward the energized synapse between its pointed nose and the oncoming shadow.

We feel the flicker of the wind on the sheet (and the rest of the scene) not only in the shapes and the clarity of the shadow-heralded proximity, but in the feathery marks of Dodd’s brush.

The lightness of the paint plays into the light-dappled freshness of the scene. But, as simple as it seems, the composition is a throwback to the High Renaissance insofar as the structure of the painting serves the narrative: “Composition” comes from the Italian “compozitione,” which was about matching the structure of the scene to its narrative subject – not simply the 2D design of our contemporary/formalist sense of composition.

While I generally think too much emphasis on titles detracts, the title “White Catastrophe” brilliantly punctuates the story set up by the painting. It also cuts to the homegrown realism of the wit behind Dodd’s everyday observations.

Despite her historic importance in the NYC art world, I can think of no painter who represents the Maine ethic of painting better than Dodd – whose painting is driven by her work ethic, powers of observation, wry humor and frugal efficiency rather than by ego, theatricality or flossy narcissism.

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I was rather disappointed with Dodd’s major 2013 show at the Portland Museum of Art because it over-focused on her less common larger works and pushed the smaller plein air panels to a tiny exit hallway. Dodd’s visual poetics are brilliant, but they are at their best when we can feel the pithy simplicity that drives them. Her work seems to resist being hauled up onto a pedestal.

The exhibition “Laundry” at Caldbeck is an ideal setting for the breeze-flickered freshness of Dodd’s sensibilities.

The works in the show all feature images of laundry hanging out to dry. The drying clothes reveal the invisible – the wind and, by their shadows, the direction of sunlight. And just as the shadows indirectly echo the cloth objects, the laundry echoes unseen inhabitants and their daily lives: the towels of bathing, the sheets of sleep, the simple clothes of workaday workdays and, of course, the practical reality of unseen underwear.

These are flags of honesty and freedom from affect. And yet they put on a show: In the sunny breeze, they dance. And we, of course, are part of the equation since we have to visually check on them to ensure they don’t catch rain or bleach – forgotten – in the sun.

“Summer Laundry,” a small horizontal panel of 1977, feels like a launching work. To the left is a bit of the purple house (the presence of a house, whether seen or not, is always implied by a clothesline), and running along the bottom of the image is an even line of treetops that tells us we are close to the line and looking up. Quietly reinforced by the dark-bottomed cotton-ball clouds blown to the right of the storytelling-sky, we can see that the wind has picked up past a safe breeze by the sheet that has flipped up above the line. We can practically hear the rumble of its clean-flickered rumple.

Yet the scenes of “Laundry” are masterfully quiet. To be with the laundry is to be alone on typical day. But it also puts the scene at home with place and purpose under a blue sky. And so it is a rather radical image in painting: Domestic idylls free from (typically male) existential angst.

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When we do see a figure (“Nude with Hat and Laundry,” 2003), she is unselfconsciously semi-nude – though very practically wearing a large hat. And just as practically, we can see that Dodd moved her face from behind the line to in front of it. While it becomes a spatial mistake, it looks better and is less distracting.

“Dishtowels in Breeze” (1980) also features a form lifting up above the line which its colleagues otherwise hold like a phalanx of wind-filled sails. The leading passage of this work set over a simple green background, however, is a poetically frugal cohort of brush-wet candy-striping strokes split by a fold – an amazing line at which the subject and its handling in paint come together for a fleeting moment.

“White Sheet Green House” (1977) takes a voluminously solid house and transforms it into silhouette and then into a shadow over which floats a white sheet beautifully defined by a light blue shadow and a few dashing strokes of gray. It’s an extraordinary bit of boldness in its lightness of touch.

The most visually dominant work is the 2005 30-by-50-inch panel “Clothesline,” but in this context we can see why the larger work called for its scale. Rather than path of the brush, the forms are defined as shapes. On this scale, Dodd makes the density of the paint a key component. The work features a Ying-Yang balance of greens with the lighter hue depicting the grass and and the darker green accounting for the laundry shadows and so on. Color is then the main player by isolating a single brilliant red rectangular towel from a suite of variously blue garments and a sheet. By keying on the density of the color values, Dodd forces the literal scale of the large painting into the compositional equation. Dodd’s shift from light to color feels like a shift from plein air to the studio – a qualitatively different approach to painting.

While Dodd wisely edits her larger work, there is something appealingly spontaneous and genuine about her smaller panels: Her “Laundry” is fresh and effervescent.

Freelance writer Daniel Kany is an art historian who lives in Cumberland. Contact him at:

dankany@gmail.com

Twitter: @dankany


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