Lot 75
**Originally Listed At $350**
Lockwood "Woody" Dennis (American, 1937-2012). "Diamond Lake" oil on canvas, 2002. Signed at lower right and titled and dated on verso. Sawtooth ridgelines and golden scree shimmer beneath a sky of lavender-blue in this compact, concentrated study of the mountains above Diamond Lake, Colorado. Painted in 2002, "Diamond Lake" distills Lockwood Dennis' signature style into bold, angular planes and a palette that crackles with saturated warmth. The rocky slopes surge forward in rhythmic formations - stylized, sculptural, and full of kinetic energy. Though often drawn to built environments, Dennis painted scenes like this with equal intensity, treating natural topography with the same structural logic he brought to suburban rooftops and city blocks. The ridges here are not passive forms, but active, architectural presences. Dark lines slice through sunlit terrain like calligraphic marks, lending the landscape a graphic clarity and compositional strength. Size: 14" W x 11" H (35.6 cm x 27.9 cm)
His painterly yet graphic style - shaped by a background in woodblock printmaking and an eye for design - is evident in the precise brushwork, contrasting color planes, and the abstraction of form into essential gesture. Here, Dennis captures not just a place, but the sensation of presence: the jagged rhythm of the Continental Divide, the warmth of high-altitude light, the intimate vastness of alpine space.
"The impetus to paint is always an experience - a specific place, weather, ordinary things remembered," Dennis once wrote. In "Diamond Lake", that ethos is clear. The mountains are reduced to their elemental essence - memory traced in pigment, light made solid, geography reimagined through a deeply personal lens.
Lockwood "Woody" Dennis was driven to paint throughout his 45-year career and each canvas reveals new aspects about him as a person - his approaches to life, the environment, and art. During the early years, Woody was most influenced by the works of Post-Impressionist pioneers of early Modernism such as Cezanne and Matisse. As he evolved, Woody developed a graphic style that was informed by the style and imagery he created for his woodblock prints.
Dennis continued, "A painting starts with an exuberance. It's good to be alive. The work is a wonderful place. The feeling seems to cover everything, but it relates especially to past experiences, beginning further back than I can remember. It becomes specific in associations with past experiences: Portland, Eastern Washington, Africa; but not with an exact description. The memory of a precise place and time - a moment of past reality is too terrible to bear, there is such a sense of loss, of things gone forever. So it is a present experience, based on the past. And perhaps the cartoon character adds the levity to remove it from the past, or 'animate' it in the present."
Lockwood Dennis paintings have been collected by the following museums and organizations: Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington; Seattle Art Commission, Seattle, Washington; Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, Oregon; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington; Swedish Medical Center Foundation, Seattle, Washington; Museum of History and Industry, Seattle, Washington; Jefferson Museum of Art and History, Port Townsend, Washington; Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington; Clallam County Historical Society, Port Angeles, Washington; Bainbridge Island Art Museum, Winslow, Washington; US Library of Congress, Washington, DC; US State Department, Washington, DC.
Provenance: Lockwood Dennis Art Estate, Boulder, Colorado, USA
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#194167
- Condition: Painting is in excellent overall condition. Signed at lower right and titled and dated on verso.
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