Lois Dodd was introduced to the writer Leslie Land by the sculptor, Bernard “Blackie” Langlais, who was at the time (early 1970s) letting Land stay in his waterside cottage in Cushing, Maine. Dodd and Langlais were friends from New York and also had connections to the Skowhegan School. When Land decided she wanted to spend the winter in Maine, she approached Dodd, whose Cushing farmhouse was, in theory, a year-round home.
What follows are Dodd’s reminiscences on drawing from the model and painting the garden, drawn from In the Sun Room, a documentary film by Melanie Essex.
I remember when she came here it was just a rocky outcropping. Blackie sent her over here. This kid arrives at my door and says, “I’d like to stay in your house for the winter.” I told her, there’s no heat here!
So she bought the garage that was across the street and in the winter when there was ice on the road, she and Sam Olsen pulled the damn thing on skids—and it’s still on skids. [. . .] And then she started to dig up and make the gardens. [. . .] Every year it was different. So it became a wonderful source.
At first, I didn’t want to paint flowers, but Nancy [Wissemann-Widrig] sitting there with that hat on and all that was great. So I did a bunch of little paintings of artists in the garden.
I was going over to paint Nancy painting the garden [. . .] but that sucked me into the garden too. I was still painting the garden when Nancy had gone home.
Dodd belonged to life drawing groups in both New York and Maine. Not classes, but regular gatherings of artists friends who met in one another’s studios—and in the summer in Maine, outside. Dodd’s summer drawing group carried on for five decades. The 1999 work included in the exhibition of two women digging is from a session that took place at model Sandy Yakovenko’s home and garden in Tenants Harbor.
Lois Dodd, Figure with Trees, watercolor on paper, 22 1/4 x 14 3/4 in., 1993.
Lois Dodd, Nudes Digging, ink on paper, 11 1/8 x 14 5/8 in., 1999.
Lois Dodd, Two Seated Nudes, watercolor and felt marker on paper, 11 1/8 x 14 3/4 in., 1999.
It was such a great joy to draw from the model [. . .] and especially, it was okay in the winter too, but especially in the summer with the figure outside in the sun. It was such an apparition amongst the apple trees and dappled light. It was such a paradisiacal kind of view of things.
I liked the twenty-minute poses—I don’t want to see a model for three hours in a pose. A twenty-minute pose, they could hold difficult poses—and those were the poses I really like to draw.
It fits right into our time, but the fact is that it’s much more interesting to see someone chop wood (or dig). I feel like there are so many great paintings of women lounging and I can’t add to that, but if somebody is doing something, that adds a whole other level of interest.