Lot 175C
Lockwood "Woody" Dennis (American, 1937-2012). "Paintings 3, Eastern Washington" oil on canvas, 1995. Signed at lower right and titled and dated on verso. A painting of paintings - and a meditation on memory, place, and the act of seeing. In "Paintings 3, Eastern Washington", Lockwood Dennis turns his brush inward, assembling a quiet chorus of his own landscape works into a single image that feels part retrospective, part puzzle, part poem. Here, five - or possibly six - painted fragments nestle within one larger composition, each window a vision of Eastern Washington's spare geometry and luminous stillness. A green storage tank floats in a darkened sky. A salmon-pink grain elevator stretches over parched earth. Shipping containers sit like toy blocks against a hedge of trees, beneath a band of summer blue. Dennis's beloved visual vocabulary returns in these embedded vignettes - flat planes, curved tanks, rust-red forms, and a palette tuned to sunset and stone. Size: 36" W x 24" H (91.4 cm x 61 cm)
But the real subject is not the land itself, nor even the paintings of it. It is the process of re-seeing. By framing his own works as subjects, Dennis reveals the recursive nature of perception: we look at landscapes, then we look at paintings of landscapes, and then we look again. Each image reframes the last. Each carries the echo of a remembered light, a distant road, a solitary afternoon. Dennis often wrote that "the impetus to paint is always an experience - a specific place, weather, ordinary things remembered." "Paintings 3, Eastern Washington" is not merely about a region but about returning to it, again and again, through the layered lens of memory and paint.
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 was quite eloquent and insightful when asked about his art. The following is an excerpt from the "On Impetus" section of his "Philosophical Musings on Painting": "The impetus to paint is always an experience - a specific place, weather, ordinary things remembered. A celebration of just being here, experiencing the world. The experience itself is somehow lost in the process, and, anyway, it's not intended that it should be conveyed. The result is a picture animated by that experience."
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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#194184
- Condition: Painting is in excellent overall condition. Signed at lower right and titled and dated on verso.
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