What I am trying to do… What a dreadful opening to a sentence or a thought even. Why should you have to or want to explain what you are trying to do? Why wouldn’t you just do it and shut up? I have been asked to give an artist’s talk, this time along with my father and brother. Our show comes down at the end of the week and it is a fitting time to take a step back and ask myself why I do what I have put on display here so this entry is somewhat of a dress rehearsal.
The context, three of us from the same family, is curious. How does one influence the others and just how does such wildly different work come out of that? I was awestruck when my father painted Disney characters on the furnace pipes in our basement. I was not in charge of decorating our house when we were growing up but Rouault, Klee and Van Gogh reproductions certainly packed a wallop. My father has an amazing ability to boil down and present concepts in a concrete form. I watched him create symbols for our rebel church group and much later distill the early wafer-stepping machines in to 35mm slides for Hampshire Instruments. But most of all I was witness to his endless collecting, in sketchbook form, of observations from woods, the countryside and construction sites. And he has a lifetime’s worth of watercolors to show for this.
My brother picked up on the boil down thing. His mostly wood pieces are exquisitely pure manifestations of form following function.
Like a punk rocker or rapper, I go for expression, both trying to capture the expression of my subject and expressing myself in the picture. And the challenge of depicting form in two dimensions has me hooked. P Diddy, playing a convict who sketches fellow inmates and guards (a variation on my thing) in the movie “Monster’s Ball” had a very cool quote that stuck with me. “I’ve always believed that a portrait captures a person far better than a photograph. It truly takes a human being to really see a human being.”
3 “D”s in Dodd Artists Talk
Monday 7-9 pm
I-Square Gallery Titus Avenue