Lot 216
Lockwood Dennis Painting "Noe Valley" (1999)
Lockwood Dennis Painting "Noe Valley" (1999)
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Lockwood "Woody" Dennis (American, 1937-2012). "Noe Valley" oil on canvas, 1999. Signed at lower right and dated and titled on verso. A city of rooftops rises in soft silhouette, distilled to its bones in sienna and blush. With "Noe Valley", painted in 1999, Lockwood Dennis strips San Francisco's sun-washed neighborhood down to structure and rhythm - a composition of forms rather than facades. The work is built almost like a blueprint or memory sketch, the entire scene rendered in a single hue against a dusty pink ground. It reads like a dream remembered at dawn: precise, but weightless. Houses stack and stagger in a syncopated cadence, their boxy outlines marked by stairwells, pitched roofs, and shuttered windows. A ramp in the foreground slices the plane, anchoring the viewer in the city's familiar, sloping terrain. Unlike his full-color oils, Dennis here leans into abstraction, favoring contour and negative space over light and volume. Size: 24" W x 36" H (61 cm x 91.4 cm)
The linework carries his hallmark clarity - deliberate, graphic, and restrained - yet the absence of shadow or hue evokes a city paused in time, rendered as memory or map. Dennis once wrote that painting was a way of animating experience - not capturing a moment, but reanimating its presence. In "Noe Valley", the artist does just that. He translates the eclectic charm and tight geometry of a beloved San Francisco district into a serenely orchestrated field of shape and tone.
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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#194183
- Condition: Painting is in excellent overall condition. Signed at lower right and dated and titled on verso.
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