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You and I are in a room in Lois Dodd\u2019s house in Maine, looking through yellow curtains, out a window. The scene is a real one \u2014 like all of Ms. Dodd\u2019s paintings \u2014 but it comes off as slightly strange. Are we really inside? <\/p>\n
The curtains, a sliver of ceiling with the lightbulb peeking into the frame, <\/p>\n
the shadow of the bed in the room, faintly rendered here, <\/p>\n
put us clearly inside the room. <\/p>\n
But then there are these woods painted on the walls. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo, first I painted the walls,\u201d Ms. Dodd told me. The walls are based on her paintings of the woods across the street, which she then painted on the walls of this room, which she then turned again into a painting. <\/p>\n
Ms. Dodd has been painting for more than eight decades. Now 99, she is gaining a wider audience<\/a>, with her first European retrospective<\/a>, a new documentary<\/a> and fairs in Paris, Berlin and Miami. <\/p>\n She came up in an art world through the 1950s that was in love with abstraction, and dominated by men. <\/p>\n But Ms. Dodd paints what she sees, like the way two roofs nearly touch: <\/p>\n Or the light sneaking through an open door: <\/p>\n \u201cThe observation is inspirational,\u201d she said. \u201cIt gets you started.\u201d <\/p>\n In the 1970s, she spent several summers painting the woods across the street. (She started spending her summers in Maine in the 1950s to escape the heat of her top-floor East Village loft.) <\/p>\n In three-hour sessions \u2014 the most she could do before the light totally changed \u2014 she painted the trees, the leaves and the spaces between them, like this from 1977: <\/p>\n Or this 14-foot-tall triptych from 1975; the three panels are stacked vertically: <\/p>\n After a few years though, something changed. <\/p>\n \u201cI went in there the following summer and looked around, and there was nothing to paint,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was like the woods said: \u2018You\u2019ve had it. We\u2019re not giving you another damn thing. Get out.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n She turned her attention to a room inside her house. <\/p>\n The patched plaster on the opposite wall already looked like clouds, so she added a bit of blue, with pigment saved from her student days at Cooper Union in Manhattan: <\/p>\n She worked her way around the room. The clouds gave way to the woods: <\/p>\n And the woods worked their way around the window: <\/p>\n \u201cThen I thought, that makes it interesting \u2014 I\u2019ll paint a painting of my painting wall.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThe Painted Room,\u201d which she completed in 1982, now lives at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine. <\/p>\n She paints fast, in thin layers. That helps create this luminous, translucent effect on the yellow curtains here: <\/p>\n She told me she likes painting windows because they help you define your composition. <\/p>\n When you\u2019re staring at a blank canvas, the window gives you an edge, a place to start. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s already framed, laid out for you.\u201d <\/p>\n Windows can offer studies in reflection and geometry, frames inside frames inside frames: <\/p>\n They become the edges that shape a world of light and shadow, and a portal that draws you into the artist\u2019s world: <\/p>\n On the chilly spring morning<\/strong> I visited her at her house in New Jersey (she\u2019ll go to the Maine house in a few weeks), the light was pouring in. <\/p>\n \u201cI bought this house because of the windows,\u201d she said. She lowered herself gently into the makeshift seat of her walker, where she keeps a cordless phone in an old tin can lashed to the side with tape. <\/p>\n She does not own a cellphone or TV, but she loves the radio. I told her my generation had a hard time focusing, distracted by our phones, sucked into endless scrolling. <\/p>\n \u201cYou either enjoy looking at the world or you wander through it without seeing it, which I think a lot of people do,\u201d she said. \u201cThey know enough to look so they don\u2019t break their neck tripping, but otherwise they may not see too much, just enough to be safe.\u201d <\/p>\n Hoping for insight into how she sees, I asked how she teaches people to paint. (She was on the faculty at Brooklyn College for more than 20 years.) <\/p>\n \u201cYou give them a list of supplies,\u201d she said. \u201cThen maybe you set up a still life, or maybe you make somebody sit in a chair and \u2026 they have to paint. That\u2019s their problem.\u201d <\/p>\n One former student told me she was painting an apple tree at a workshop in Maine when Ms. Dodd walked by. <\/p>\n \u201cYou know you don\u2019t have to paint all the apples,\u201d she recalled her saying. <\/p>\n Her students say they learned from these wry critiques and from watching her work \u2014 fast, nimble, decisive. <\/p>\n I asked what was catching her eye at that very moment. <\/p>\n \u201cThe light on the floor and the window are kind of great right now. It\u2019s what the light does. That\u2019s the most exciting.\u201d <\/p>\n There was an in-progress painting of a roof on her easel, and she had two fresh panels ready to go. <\/p>\n I asked where she had found the discipline to paint for all those hours, all those days, all those years. She cupped a hand to her ear to hear my question. <\/p>\n \u201cOh, that\u2019s not discipline,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s just being alive.\u201d <\/p>\n This is an installment in our series of experiments<\/a> on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait<\/a>; a sudden rain over a bridge<\/a>; a unicorn tapestry<\/a>; some buckets from Home Depot<\/a>; and a Whistler painting<\/a>. <\/p>\n