Tomory Dodge: Newfoundland and Back

Philip Martin Gallery is delighted to present, “Newfoundland and Back," an exhibition of new easel paintings by Tomory Dodge. The exhibition features works painted on-site in Los Angeles and Newfoundland, Saratoga Springs and the California mountains.

Tomory Dodge's easel pictures are done from direct observation. Observed light - and therefore observed color - shape these paintings. The sun lights up a Los Angeles hillside, filters through a window, and strikes the petals of a flower with intensity reminiscent of Camille Corot's famous 1820s paintings of the Roman Campagna. At the same time, in these pieces, as in all of Tomory Dodge’s works, we feel the play of the flatness of the picture plane against the alluring depth of painterly space.

"The question of representation has always held a central place in my work," Dodge notes, commenting that not only landscape and abstraction, but also still-life and abstraction, and portraiture and abstraction, are all aspects of his artistic practice. In an image of Saratoga Springs, New York, the rain falls in a screen of brushstrokes that both alludes to the painting itself and what it depicts - the gentle delineation of the meadows and woods we see before our eyes. In Tomory Dodge’s Newfoundland pictures - done while on a one-month visit to the Canadian province - the wild Atlantic Canadian coast, with its beaches and ocean-side communities, is captured in rows of horizontal strokes.  

Inspired in part by Matisse, Tomory Dodge's paintings of interiors take the vantage point of an individual engrossed in examining the domestic objects around them, while at the same time looking at the scene outside. Matisse opens doors - and windows - for artists and viewers alike. Writing about one such work, "Open Window" (1905), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, one writer suggests that, "The vista may look out to a small French fishing port—but, really, this window opens on the future of painting in the twentieth century," going on to note that, "The Fauves liberated color from any requirements other than those posed by the painting itself. 'When I put a green,' Matisse would say, 'it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.' Art exerted its own reality. Color was a tool of the painter's artistic intention and expression, un-circumscribed by imitation. Matisse’s imperative was to 'interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture.'" Like Matisse, Dodge's paintings exert their own reality, walking a fine line between vision and making, and reminding us of the power of our own vision.