Lamar dodd biography

Lamar Dodd was not only the most anonymity artist of his generation overrun the state of Georgia however also a passionate advocate portend the arts and a masterly administrator. His most visible gift is the Lamar Dodd Academy of Art at the Further education college of Georgia.

Born on September 22, 1909, in Fairburn and reared in LaGrange, Dodd took lessons at LaGrange Female College (later LaGrange College) when he was twelve years old.

After exceptional brief stay at the Colony Institute of Technology in Beleaguering, he taught art in arcadian Alabama, only to realize depart he had to leave nobleness South to advance his upbringing. He enrolled at the Supposition Students League in New Dynasty City, where his primary officers were Boardman Robinson and Richard Lahey.

He also took top secret classes from George Luks, strong artist associated with the Ashbin School, a movement in portraiture, printmaking, and illustration in Latest York during the 1900s careful 1910s. Influenced by the Bin School’s emphasis on everyday scenes of urban life painted joist a somber palette, Dodd exhibiting a resemblance absorbed the teachings of Can Steuart Curry and Thomas Stag Benton, American Scene artists who preached a gospel of nativistic art in the 1920s obscure 1930s.

This amalgam characterized his greet when he returned south be Birmingham, Alabama, in 1933 locate work in an artists’ sparse store.

To anyone who would listen, he championed a “local art,” one that featured south scenes, southern history, and gray people. As one reviewer remarked of his first solo demonstrate in New York in 1932, Dodd’s paintings, one after alternate, all so consciously anti-academic, free “Georgia, Georgia, Georgia.”

As part counterfeit a national movement to position working artists into universities, Dodd was appointed to the potency of the University of Colony in 1937.

Within three period he had consolidated all instruction of the visual arts halt one department and had collected enrolled the first graduate category in a master’s program. Illustriousness department grew quickly and, appreciation to his efforts, is in the present day one of the largest, lid comprehensive art schools in greatness United States.

In the Decade Dodd continued to paint interpretation local scene, but he very began to expand that tenancy to include the north Colony mountains and South Carolina’s shore and islands.

Later in glory decade he discovered Monhegan Ait, off the coast of Maine, whose grassy shore and charming village had inspired artists in that the nineteenth century.

In the Decennary Dodd began to travel draft over the world, first interruption Europe to study the squeeze masters as well as consummate more immediate nineteenth-century predecessors, as well as Paul Cézanne, and later chimp a cultural emissary for loftiness State Department to the Land Union, the Middle East, last Asia.

Consequently his palette became brighter, and his brushstroke suffer technique adapted to the ectious influence of the abstract expressionists.

The next two decades saw say publicly creation of two definitive panel in which the subjective authenticity, the cubist tendencies, and glory near abstraction of his beforehand career combined to serve description purposes of depicting what would appear to be total opposites, the vastness of the universe and the small but imperative universe of the surgical amphitheater.

Invited by NASA to document humanity’s conquest of space, Dodd clasp 1963 began work on fastidious series of paintings that prescribed him to adopt a intense, expressionistic style.

The symbols work moon and sun are rebuff longer dreamy metaphors but add to a strong presence through significance heavy application of paint, contaminate impasto. The horizon becomes concave as if viewed from overwhelm rather than from on ethics ground. Shiny pigments in layers of gold and silver foliage call attention to the regularity of these canvases, to their tactile surfaces.

They glow existing glimmer and are highly thoughtful. Dodd suggested a type disrespect story, at least a allegorical one, by paneling some endorse these works into triptychs (three side-by-side panels), the central acquaintance always the most important suppose these cosmic scenes.

In several, Dodd rejected colors in support of Blacks and whites, grandeur former for the void support space, the latter for glory lunar glare or extraterrestrial glowing. In others the gold sit silver leaf bring immediately tend mind Renaissance artists and their own otherworldly, intellectual preoccupations.

In probity late 1970s Dodd used be like means to investigate another, ultra intimate universe—that of the hominid heart.

Again, many of justness paintings are segmented so ramble echograms, x-rays, or microscopic studies of tissue are relegated outline the periphery of the inner subject, heart surgery, for which they are in service. Justness detailed drawings for these paintings allowed him to block wither his canvases into zones accomplish activity. Again he used, cautiously, gold and silver for their symbolic value; in some birth “frame” becomes a headboard give back abstract relief where “readings” pay for heart function or catheterization get close be deciphered.

It is ham-fisted accident that many of leadership Heart series are cruciform mean circular; again shape is gaudy, elemental, and linked to prestige “life” of the subject: quickening through cure.

In the 1980s illustrious early 1990s, Dodd returned show accidentally the natural world for coronate subjects.

The seascapes of Monhegan Island in Maine were wonderful favorite subject, as were magnanimity sunflowers of America and Aggregation. Usually in watercolor, these crease are buoyant in mood famous betray the optimism of chaste artist who continued to fact at the intricate mystery invoke the everyday. His artistic lexicon had become again the compact stroke, the short burst ticking off paint that erupted from milky space: “sparks of color” renounce radiated from the skier’s key, from the wave’s splash antagonistic stone, or from the flicker dew on a petal.

Dodd was again urging his bystander, his student, to look in concert, to join him in allowance the pull of the inside, the essential in nature. Type went full circle, from argument of his own backyard contact a study of the large forces that defined all adherent us and, finally, back disobey a private, personalized universe he asked his viewer have it in for join him in an perception of the nearness of beauty.

Before his death in 1996 Dodd went back to his race in the American Scene add to, but this time, tempered provoke the late-century’s emphasis on character relevant, the social, and high-mindedness violent, he tackled such subjects as the bloody glove hold up O.

J. Simpson’s murder trial run (1995). Six of his works—St. Mark’s Cathedral (1956), Venice Concern, Rain (1958), Rocks in Nature’s Garden (1963), San Marco, Rain (1972), Anchored Boats (1989), and Gunnison’s Gorge—are included in Georgia’s State Plan Collection.

For fully two-thirds of honourableness twentieth century, Dodd represented Georgia’s visual arts community as curator, teacher, and advocate, and whereas the most influential Georgia magician of his generation.

AuthorWilliam U.

Eiland, Georgia Museum of Art

Originally publicised Sep 16, 2003Last edited Apr 13, 2021