Category: Notes On Painting

Summer First Fridays in Rochester, like art scenes everywhere this time of year, are low gear affairs. The warm nights are more suited to watching low riders than stretching your mind. We started with that fantastic, red lentil, sweet potato dish at Good Luck. A monster thunderstorm rolled in and out before we finished. Fela Kuti was playing on the sound system in the bathroom. If this is what the kitchen staff are running on, that would explain why the food is so good.

So attendance was down at the galleries but that is not necessarily a bad thing. We were able to engage with the artists at every stop.

Nathan Lyons steals the show over at Spectrum Gallery with his color photos. If you are able to call up his images you’ll note they are usually black and white. At first encounter you read the photos literally. Funny signs, odd situations and crazy juxtapositions of elements that define our time. All are important elements but the compositions are painterly strokes of brilliance.

Jim Thomas had a mini retrospective next door at r Gallery, everything from his light sculptures to charcoal figure studies and abstracted stones in oil pastel. The exhibition featured the work of friends and colleagues associated with RIT so Judd Williams and Bill Keyser were featured as well. We chatted with Scott McCarney and Bo Poulin and headed over to RoCo for their annual State of the City show. Bleu appointed Peggi and me as this month’s “First Friday Fanatics.” I tried to refuse but the honor comes with a gift certificate to Victoire so we reconsidered. We really liked this show. A video performance group captures the outsider/insider take on Detroit. You can walk under a wild assortment of objects found on the streets of Manhattan by Laura Quattrocchi and then marvel at Ron Klein’s beautiful wall installation of both natural and man-made found objects. It is something you’ll have to immerse yourself in before the summer is over.

We parked over on Scio Street and on the wall to the car we heard indestinguishable music bouncing off the downtown buildings. It was either coming from the Puerto Rican Festival or the outdoor Donna the Buffalo concert. It was so abstract it sounded like one of Eno’s soundtracks or perhaps a sound sculpture for First Friday.

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The Irondequoit Art Trail, mostly artist’s home studios, is a spaced out affair. Irondequoit itself is pretty spaced out, stretching from Empire Boulevard at the bottom of the bay to neighborhoods that back up to the river off Saint Paul which runs all the way up to the lake and then across the lakeshore to Sea Breeze. We started out following a pdf that we downloaded and picked up a map at I-Square Gallery but one of the artists had another map with small graphic samples of each of the artists on the trail so we switched to that. They were all slightly different and it is hard to connect the dots.

Three stops stood out. Craig Wilson’s studio on Saint Paul was one. He had just set up a tent that he planned on using at the Clothesline Show. Instead of just admiring his metal sculpted fish we entertained various methods of hanging the hefty works and we considered the advantages of the grey or white mesh backgrounds. And Craig recommended a car mechanic for us before we left. Ours has just retired.

This guy named Beaty had all his paintings out in his driveway. He told us he wasn’t a very good art student so just copied paintings out of books and we could see the evidence as we sifted through stacks of Cezanne’s, Picasso’s and Van Gogh’s.

Two houses on Lake Bluff Road (it looks exactly like it sounds) showed watercolors that paled in comparison to the view out their windows but a nearby stop at a Quonset Hut on Culver had no windows at all to compete with the work of John Leonard. He told us he is a roofer and he just bought the place because his house was full and he planned to name it, “The Artist’s Cave” and added, “the tagline will be, “Not So Fine Art.” He was painting the ceiling to look like a cave and his work was everywhere, all sorts of styles in all mediums. Some of it was very good like his self portrait called, “The Arrogant Artist.”

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I took this guy over to the Creative Workshop where he’ll be in a show that starts there next week. I have a new batch of crime faces to tidy up and photograph. Steve Black has invited me to show some drawings in Brooklyn this summer so I’ll have to get them framed and ready to travel.

I was buying the matt board for this one at Rochester Art Supply and Sally from High Falls Gallery was behind the counter with another guy. She asked if Armand had contacted me because he is putting a show together about prison in DC or somewhere and she recommended my work. The other guy asked what I did and Sally told him, “Paul paints local convicts and and I take all the bitterness and rage out of their faces.” That did not ring right but I left it at, “No, I didn’t hear from Armand.

I remember showing my six basketball players from the nineties at Cylinder Sound behind the Bug Jar and Dave Ripton, who was recording there, told me, “I’d like what your portraits would look like if they were on heroin.” That stuck with me.

This guy does look kinda sweet.

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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

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By the time my father, brother and I got to the 1964 World’s Fair Governor Rockefeller had already yanked the Warhol contribution to the Philip Johnson designed New York State Pavilion. His mugshots were up for two days before the political censorship. I took the shot (above) at the I. M. Pei designed Johnson Museum on Cornel’s campus in Ithaca. I could not let the fifty year anniversary of this act go by without calling further attention to it. The mugshots Warhol produced for the Pavilion are on display at the Queens Museum now while across town you could be in line for the show of “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany” at the Neue Gallery.

The Crimestopper page in our local newspaper got me thinking.

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I work best under a deadline, not that this is my best work, just that I did get the job done in very short period of time. Small versions of my crime faces not proven too beneficial for Rochester Contemporary in their annuual 6×6 show. The show is their biggest fund raiser. All the work is donated and all the sales go to RoCo (100% commission) so why not go out of my way to do something commercial.

We were coming from my parent’s new apartment on Portland Avenue, headed downtown last week for some reason, and as we turned left onto Hudson there was UNEEDA Tire. Perfect. Small paintings, ala Wreckless Eric, of iconic Rochester companies. Many of my favorite have slipped away but it was easy to come up with six that fit the bill. I just closed my eyes and pictured myself sitting in the stands at the old Red Wing stadium on Knothole Day marveling at the pop art displays on the home run fence.

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The once a month gallery night event called First Friday got too big for its britches. There was too much going on in the same time slot to do justice to worthy shows. Of course the opening is not the time to really see a show anyway, that’s what gallery hours are for. RoCo and Warren Philips Gallery and many others have moved their openings to other nights. Theres one coming up this Friday in fact.

All of that is not to say First Friday is over. It is great fun to see so many people out and about looking at art. Heather, shown above, was holding court in the Hungerford Building. That’s one of her big black snowflakes on her white wall. She has a delightful way of upstaging her her own work.

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Today I will pick some drawings to frame for the upcoming “3 “D”s in Dodd (there are more)” show at I-Square Gallery.

My dad, Leo Dodd, is an inspiration. He is also my favorite watercolor artist. My brother, John, is my favorite furniture designer and a craftsman of the highest order. I am delighted to be part of this show featuring the work of all three of us. I hope you can stop out and see the show.

Stop by the opening on Friday April 11 at 7pm if you like.
View work from the show.

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I almost get the sense that Warren Phillips’ Frame Shop would be a lot busier if people didn’t feel as though this gem of a place was their little secret. They might want to make sure that Warren can meet their deadlines or they might not want to spread the word for fear that Warren may raise his prices. But artists and art collectors are not that selfish and when you get to know him you naturally want to do whatever you can to support him.

Warren has a great eye so if you are in doubt, let him pick the frame. He’s a craftsman and will even make one from scratch for you. And if you stop in without any art at all, he has a terrific collection of prints by local artists for sale. If you have the time. Warren has the gift of gab as well so you might want to hang while he makes your frame. Warren has been a fixture on East Avenue for a long time but the rent’s going up, way up, and he has ninety days to find another place.

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I’ve been drawing the concrete infrastructure that was put under the traffic circles on the old 590. I’m working from a bunch of photos that I took a few years back. Having fun with it but finding it is not as exciting as drawing these guys. I brought back a bunch of holy cards from Spain and I have one of the dreamy Santa Gema Galgani propped up near my monitor. I’m thinking about portraits of the saints.

I’m looking at Mary Heilmann for inspiration.

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Back about ten years ago or so David Hockney was in the news with his theory about Renaissance artists using a device like a Camera Obscura and/or mirrors to create their masterpieces. He pointed to distortions in the length of model’s bodies in some famous paintings and even tell -tale convex mirrors on the walls of rooms in the paintings. He wrote a book about it and this Tim guy, a successful tinkerer with money and no art background, set out to prove Hockney right by painting a Vermeer. Like a Renaissance inventor he ingenoiusly determined the right combination of lens and mirrors painted a damn Vermeer.

The movie, “Tim’s Vermeer,” now playing at the Little makes it clear how much patience is required to paint in this tedious fashion. I’m thinking once Vermeer sold his first painting he probably hired minimum wage employees to paint his pictures. I kept wondering what my friend, the painter, Steve Piotrowski who loves Vermeer would think about all this. Someone in the movie made the point that it is only the art historians who are upset to see Vermeer’s star tarnished. Artists just shrug.

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I photographed some homeless Rochester teenagers a few years ago. I did many drawings of them and then paintings. I finally finished a series of charcoal drawings of them and now I’m ready to move on. But first I have clean u the drawings a bit, spray them with fixative, photograph them am and put them in in a drawer between sheets of glassine.

I plan to pick my favorite version of them and show the batch in an upcoming show at I-Square gallery. The show in tentatively entitled “3 ‘D’s In Dodd” and there may be a subtitle such as “There Are More” so as not to slight the rest of the family. My brother John and our dad will also be featured. Lately I start with a source and quickly stop referring to it so the drawings look quite different from one another. The guy above in an upcoming show at the Creative Workshop.

Today is a perfect day to photograph and a not so good day to spray fixative. There is twenty inches of snow forecast for those of us near the lake and our Margaret Explosion gig at the Little has been canceled because the weather.

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When we were in Madrid we had coffee one morning with an artist from Toronto. She was there for an art fair, ArCo Madrid, and she was bemoaning the state of art today. To my ears she sounded more like a business woman than an artist. What artist thinks about the market? But the point she was making was one that stuck with me.

She produced large scale wall art that had something to do with therapy or healing and she had been all over the world with her art. She told us downtown Toronto was being rebuilt as luxury lofts, condos and apartments and everything was open plan with large glass windows and this trend is playing out everywhere. “There are no more walls,” she exclaimed. “People are not buying wall art because they don’t have any wall space.”

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It seems to me you could get away with anything within the confines of a gallery. You make the place look like a white walled gallery thereby raising the attention paid to the infrastructure, the repurposing of an industrial space for example, bare concrete floors, state of the art LED lighting rigs, remnants of brick walls and plumbing overhead, someone behind a Mac at a desk in the front, basically an empty room. I mean you don’t really need to show any art at all. You just raise our awareness and then find some other way to make money.

With almost ninety percent of the Great Lakes frozen over we wind up with no “Lake Affect” snow and twice as many sunny days. The wind coming out of the west normally collects moisture and dumps it when it hits land again but with all the ice out there this supply of moisture is cut off. I suspect the winter is done for this weekend but it was a great winter for cross-country skiing so I’m not complaining.

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