Who got to decide that musicians play and painters work? Instrumentalists have to practice alone for hours, and then perform under nerve-racking scrutiny, slaves to the beat. We can all picture the perspiring face of a rock guitarist or classical pianist screwed up in paroxysms of concentration. Painters, on the other hand, can take their time in the serenity of their studios, perfecting what they want us to see. And even when angst or indecision is their expressive mode, these choices are “performed” at leisure—recollected in tranquility, as the poet puts it.

Lois Dickson makes us think a lot about time and space, work and play. Her compositions are rich, dense and busy. Form and color work double-time to denote depth while exuding no-sweat exuberance, the brush dancing on the plane. This summer [2016] saw the culmination of a sustained trajectory in her painting journey from which no less than two solo exhibitions were to be selected, opening in as many months, first at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY and then at the Painting Center in New York City. A woman in her 80s whose paintings routinely stretch to six feet or more in a given direction, the sheer physicality of her output is prodigious. But adding to this, and what truly inspires awe, is the sense of progress—a striving for clarity while maintaining complexity—that characterizes her oeuvre.

A ludic morphology lies at the heart of Dickson’s endeavor. Elaborations of shape and excavations of depth animate her pictorial intelligence in ways that are at once playful and earnest. Intelligence is the operative word here, for Dickson always presents us with both a plethora of information and persuasive principles regarding its organization. Singularity and multiplicity cohabit in scenes imagined and observed. Her brushstrokes are at once measured and fresh. Surfaces are lively but form has definitiveness and weight.

When, earlier this fall, I had the chance to examine an extensive group of recent paintings in her Columbia County studio something that became very clear was the particular nature of development in her work, whether within a given canvas or from picture to picture or across this segment of her mature oeuvre. Work and play are equally and powerfully in operation. Unprogrammed improvisation is the dominant vibe, and yet the progress within and between canvases suggests its own logic. You can read the story of her thoughts in a body of canvases; stop that narrative at any given picture and formal and thematic teleologies thread their way through its immediate predecessors. But jump from the first to the last within a sequence, and even though recurring motifs are unmistakably Dicksonian and each picture carries the DNA of her touch and palette, an aesthetic gulf opens up, suggestive of fearless experimentation, of unbound formal curiosity, of an artist who refuses the straightjacket of a “trademark” style.

What struck me quite forcibly was the modernity of Dickson’s progress—modernity, that is, as opposed to postmodernity. OK, there’s a leading role for the Pixar/Disney fish character Nemo in her almost George Condo-like painting of that title from 2016, and a jocular sense of Mike Kelley run amok within the pictorial space of Las Meninas in Procession (2015). But the accumulating jumble of Dickson’s imagery is irony free. She lets forms and feelings dictate a scene, and yet there is always direction. It seems, therefore, not a coincidence that – contemporary references inferred above notwithstanding – the formal touchstones for Dickson’s style are firmly rooted in the canon of early and mid-20th century modernism. The plasticity of her facture can recall Marsden Hartley, George Beckmann, or Philip Guston in Tough Guy (2016), What Happened (2016) and Over Easy (2015) respectively, or the smooth impasto of phases in the 1930s paintings of Arshile Gorky, de Kooning or Stuart Davis in cleaner surfaced pictures like Glimpse or Citrus Pull (both 2016). In a singingly crisp, almost hard-edged canvas like the admittedly unfinished Pas de Deux (2016) the Orphism of the Delaunays or the Suprematist phase of Liubov Popova come to mind. And, of course, Matisse, Picasso and Bonnard are frequent associates of her brush.

All this is not just, to my mind, a question of taste, of her sensibility gravitating to this lush extended revel in the art history of painterly experimentation. Rather, it suggests that her painting agenda is motored by modernist purposiveness. Think of the number of images in Dickson where it almost literally seems like a machine is driving the forms in some kind of vortex or oscillation. Roundabout (2016), a delicious little painting of 10 x 10 inches, has a Futurist feel in the frenzied spin of wayward blades. In Over Easy it seems like engine parts are extruded from rotating giant screws chugging away in the center of the composition. But I’m not suggesting Dickson as some kind of neo-Futurist: the mechanical is always offset by the organic in her shape vocabulary, recalling the primary role of plein air landscape and surreally improvised but botanically exact explorations of plant life in her evolution as a painter. In fact, a dialectics of the organic and the geometric is itself an active current within modernism, one that allows an artist of the next century (ours) to continue the great experiment, in earnest, without recourse to irony.

In the spirit of this dialectic, I see the quarry of Dickson’s quest as a kind of biomorphic cubism. Biomorphic in that shapes follow internal laws of growth in their abstraction and reinvention. Cubist in that time and space are facetted in multiplicities of perspective, in that forms are seen from different directions simultaneously, in that deep pockets of space cohabit with insistent formal flatness. Another smaller canvas, Gallery, is almost a dramatization of this kind of play. A Prussian blue form is seen in duplicate on what almost reads like an Expressionist stage set with intimations of mirroring or a receding back stage space hidden behind flaps. The shape can read variously as an extending hand and forearm or a fetal form. This is one of those “clue” paintings that empowers the viewer to find similar instances of pockets and facets in more ambitiously abstracted and complex larger compositions—and they abound. The triumphs in Dickson come in moments of “push-pull” in Hans Hofmann’s famous phrase, in which credible, emotionally resonant depths are struck within the necessary-seeming literal flattening of the picture surface, in which illusion and actuality arrive at a state of détente in their perennial struggle—a playpen within a battlefield.

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When, earlier this fall, I had the chance to examine an extensive group of recent paintings in Lois Dickson’s Columbia County studio something that became very clear was the particular nature of development in her work, whether within a given canvas or from picture to picture or across this segment of her mature oeuvre. Ludic improvisation is the dominant vibe, and yet the progress within and between canvases suggests its own logic. What struck me quite forcibly was the modernity of Dickson’s progress—modernity, that is, as opposed to postmodernity. OK, there’s a leading role for the Pixar/Disney fish character Nemo in her almost George Condo-like painting of that title from 2016, and a jocular sense of Mike Kelley run amok within the pictorial space of Las Meninas in Procession (2015). But the accumulating jumble of Dickson’s imagery is irony free. She lets forms and feelings dictate a scene, but there is always clarity and rigor in the direction.

Lois Dickson, Nemo, 2016. Oil on linen, 64-x-64 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and John Davis Gallery

John Davis Gallery, until October 9, 2016. 362-1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534, (518) 828-5907
Painting Center, from October 6, 2016. 547 W 27th St #500, New York, NY 10001,

 (212) 343-1060

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Mary Ijichi, Dan Mills, and Jeffrey Reed at George Billis Gallery
October 28 – November 22, 2014
525 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 645 2621

Functioning as pressure valves for excessively solicited curators and dealers, cluster exhibitions — mini-one person shows that offer a third alternative to the expansive solo show and the thematic group show — give artists the benefit of a solo listing, and the sponsoring gallery an efficient scheduling solution. Of the venues I visited one evening this month, the Painting Center managed to squeeze together solo shows by Elisa Jensen, Lois Dickson and Ying Li in their modest space, while the George Billis Gallery offered its own trio of solos with Jeffrey Reed, Mary Ijichi and Dan Mills. Billis’s recently expanded gallery is a welcome improvement for a venue dedicated to providing exposure to a large stable of artists. Lois Dickson’s choice of Elisa Jensen and Ying Li to share the space with her this month is an expression of solidarity among the membership of this long-standing artist-run institution. I wished they all had more space to share.

Elisa Jensen’s work was surprisingly large, having previewed the images online and assumed a scale that would have matched what I know of the space itself. They are urban scenes with a flat, linear quality reminiscent of Ben Shahn. The wall graffiti in Yellow Skirt, Brooklyn (all works 2014, except where noted) shares the same slender calligraphy as the bicycles depicted in several other pictures. By a crude delineating technique, Jensen suspends her imagery between a gritty realism and a self-conscious primitivism that in tandem captures both the solidity and the transient temporality of a cluttered Brooklyn sidewalk.

On the other side of a half wall, Lois Dickson’s abstractions evoked a melding of space and figure one might associate with better examples of allegorical symbolism. Her ability to match a remarkable inventiveness with subtle paint handling is particularly evident in Backstage, a canvas that, frankly, deserved the sort of space Larry Gagosian recently squandered in his uptown digs on the sophomoric maneuvers of Richard Prince. It is a canvas of rare erudition and presence. It alone is worth the trip to this fifth floor roost, high above the gallery district’s hinterlands.

Ying Li, occupying the small chamber (the euphemistically familiar “project” room) to the side of Dickson’s allotment, succeeded in reproducing the charged feeling of a working studio with selections from an extended study of views framed by the square lights of a large, grid-like window. The window is that of a space Li moved into after her husband’s untimely passing. The poignancy of her sharing her partner’s perspective on the city through the same transom is kept silently personal, leaving the viewer with a characteristic maelstrom of multiple views, painted in Li’s fierce, brawling color and seismic texture. And yet the Monet blue of City Series #3: Blue Curtain hints with both delicacy and abandon at the solitude of a podium on an empty stage.

Attuned, I suppose to the square frame of Li’s work, I was drawn immediately, at Billis, to Jeffery Reed’s landscapes. On panels measuring little more than nine by nine inches, Reed proves himself a match to the elusive ambition of his forebears: the depiction of air and light. Refined in the studio from outdoor studies made in Maine, Pennsylvania and Ireland, Reed combines memory and visual notes to produce jewels of form and color, informed by late afternoon cloud patterns, sunlit structures and receding planes — well, let’s face it, the most conventional aspects of landscape painting one could imagine. And yet there is not a hint of pedantic posturing or histrionic calls to tradition. Soft Rain, measuring a mere six by ten inches, is an affirming tour de force of nature seen through a sensibility.

Reed’s sturdy reserve proved that he, too, could endure the compression of an undersized-solo-show confederacy. But there was still more to see. A mere head turn and I was presented with Mary Ijichi’s drawings and collages, again of modest scale hovering around sixteen inches, which blend string tape with acrylic paint on Mylar. Quietly contemplative, they mimic the delicacy of Paul Klee but with a different sense of playfulness. Here the focus is on the phenomenology of patterns. The text-oriented pieces place her closer (though not necessarily indebted) to Agnes Martin. They reiterate the accidental texture of a Roman Opalka, yet steer clear of his obsessive density.

Ijichi’selegance compels the observer to locate herself at an optimal viewing distance, which turns out to be rather close and fortunately harmonious with the installation. Intimacy, however, is not an interest shared by Dan Mills, whose very public approach is to apply color to large printed maps by painting over their written information, returning the cartographer’s data exertions back into the drawn and painted renderings that all maps really are. Though most of the work failed to transcend the obvious gimmick, there were notable exceptions: Bleed (52) displays genuine painterly authority, and Outtake A’s (2013) extended strokes offers a winning digression from the motif. They work because they do not rely on their maps per se.

Those of us occupying the lower echelon of art-world actors struggle to resist what often seems like structural hostility toward an art of circumspection. But as the struggle continues I suppose we have to make the most of available opportunities. The organizers of these six exhibitions may not have been able to provide optimal viewing conditions for their artists, but it proved enough.

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January 6 – January 29

Lois Dickson paints what Cézanne called the “bones of nature.” Her primary subject matter here is bracket fungus, or asymmetrical rows of scalloped spores that grow on fallen trees, and other types of fungi with differently shaped and colored caps, gills, and stipes.

“Lost,” (2004), a large square painting, is a barely contained mass of tangled brush and leaves, with the suggestion of shadowy tree trunks in the background. The wall of entangled twigs, leaves and branches boldly takes up two thirds of the canvas and the dark verticals of tree trunk are placed in the top third. The reworking of contours, based on numerous observations of photographs or actual locales, keeps the pictorial space shallow. Shapes are repeated and the linear activity spreads out towards the edges of the canvas. This diffusion of linear marks is not contained by a tight architectural structure. The interplay of many different shades of brown and green, the harmonization of mid-tomes, is wonderful to look at.

In “Commencement,” (2004), we see a fine display of the artist’s preference for small to medium sized hatches. The tension between the independent life of the brushstroke and the descriptive power of the mark is never fully resolved. The small almost rectangular scribbles which form the main imagery are reminiscent of Cézanne. The artist looks at the subject and modifies the contours again and again through careful reiterations. Forms are defined by the counterbalancing of horizontal and vertical strokes of paint. We see a preponderance of dash like brushstrokes, which are almost straight lines, miraculously form into curved edges. The central fungus shape is like a diamond placed in a deep blue velvet ring box. It is articulated towards us by a structure which echoes it. In many of the canvases in this show the fungus or main focus of the composition consists of lighter and brighter hatches of color, mainly off whites, tans, ochres, and red oranges. The backdrops supporting these meaty funguses are diffuse darker tones. The artist’s fascination with these unique objects, the warts or tumors of the earth, emphasizes the humble and focused and intense task she has set herself, to make a new object that is a record of the interconnectivity between mind, hand and eyes.

The “Dunderawe” series of small paintings probably has nothing to do with the castle Dunderawe, located on the Scottish Island known as Fraoch Eilean, or Isle of Heather, but does include some beautiful paintings. The most successful paintings in this series have a thick impasto, not unlike Monet’s late water lily paintings. The crusted pigment, layers of deep violets, greens and browns, surround the pale white, orange, and yellow meat of the enthroned fungus. The busier small canvases in this series are not as impressive as the larger busy compositions, because the visible revisions and implied sense of movement through use of repetition are stunted by the format. It would be interesting to see the artist use large areas of thick impasto in larger works. Like Monet did with his water lilies, Dickson creates objects that reek of the real but inevitably affirm an abstract concept.

Lois Dickson creates interesting pictorial spaces because they are ambiguous. This is due to the mix of natural and unnatural light sources and coloration. She revisits the subject whether it’s a specific location outdoors or fungi placed on a table, over and over again, and this re-looking is the true subject matter of the work.

One wonders if a more exacting realism or a complete surrender to the abstract would push the artist in an interesting direction. Through her worship of natural forms, her ability to rediscover some new nuance every time she re-looks at her subject and her overlaying of one set of observations over another, Dickson creates a new abstract concept of the natural world.

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