COLIN DODD (England, b. 1954)

Dodd has an evidently inexhaustible supply of different manners of brushwork. The majority of these are employed for figuration with varying degrees of modelling, but the rest establish shifting abstract fields in which the artist masterfully assembles his plenitude of figurative imagery. A typical large painting by Dodd can contain as many as ten distinct stylistic modes of abstraction and figuration, skillfully unified by a visual logic that unfailingly persuades. Dodd's work richly acknowledges the historical fact, and the validity, of the progressive breakup of painting under Modernism and Post-Modernism. His paintings do this by frankly containing traces of that very disintegration. Yet at the same time, Dodd's individual art is violently opposed to, and convincingly transcends, this historically recent, complete disintegration of the art of painting. In the end, Dodd's work accomplishes its artistic—visual and intellectual—transcendence by means of its enormous, reconstitutive complexity in recovering innovatively the lost and abandoned, technical and expressive resources of painting.

The cultural comprehensiveness of Dodd's imagery is vast. His command of technique appears endless in its ingenuity, and is so ceaseless in its restless change from painting to painting, and within single paintings, as to give a capsule survey of painting styles for the past century and a half. His paintings erupt with imagery catalyzed into a poised and compelling harmony. They float multiple images in an intricate narrative assemblage, achieving an interwoven and balanced compositional mastery. The sheer intelligence behind his manipulation of varied styles and images, into a state of firm equilibrium, brings back into painting a level of intellectual application and complexity that it has been lacking for several decades, under the reign of the late-dismantlement esthetic of deconstructive Post-Modernism, which is now definitively finished. Among the small, international group of artists now working to reconstitute collectively the lost art of painting—from its complete, systematic dismantlement under Modernism and Post-Modernism—none demonstrates work of more visual intelligence and imagination than Dodd's.

Erik Satie, Composer
Oil on canvas
48.5"w x 72.75"h
Colin Dodd

Luis Buñuel
Oil on canvas
48"w x 76"h
Colin Dodd

Sigmund Freud
Oil on canvas
48.25"w x 60.75"h
Colin Dodd

Portrait of Sergei Eisenstein

Colin Dodd

England, b. 1954

Colin Dodd demonstrates a single-handed, single-minded ability to effectively resuscitate the long-dead art of portraiture. His picture of Eisenstein (1898-1948) is filled with images of the Russian film director's life and work. All the images are juxtaposed or superimposed to yield a masterfully integrated work, composed of many distinct parts.

The Mayan pyramid rising into the upper left corner of the painting is counterbalanced on the right by the large profile of a Mayan woman looking down toward the center of the painting. Both images derive from a scene in Eisenstein's film Thunder over Mexico (1933). So do the dark blue sky and the outline of a skull wearing a mustache and sombrero, the latter image taken from an annual Mexican folk festival, the Day of the Dead. The skull is filled in with a red portrait of Josef Stalin. The profile of Ivan the Terrible in the upper right corner is from Eisenstein's historical film (1944) about this 16th-century ruler, the first Czar of Russia.

A faint, lavender, pointed shape, rising on the left side of the picture, represents the forward deck of the battleship Potemkin, whose crew's mutiny in 1905 against their pre-revolutionary, Czarist officers is the focus of another Eisenstein film (1925). The Russian spelling of Potemkin, this film's title, appears at the bottom of the painting in red. The two circular shapes on the ship's deck are meant to suggest the spectacles of the ship's surgeon, eyeglasses used in the film to magnify the maggots in meat fed to the outraged, rebellious crew. The fire exploding from the ship's cannon in the picture, overlaid on a film strip, is ironically directed at the portrait of Stalin. The frozen image of a screaming woman, on another film strip to the right, is that of a nurse in the same movie, who sees a child shot in the famous massacre (also 1905) on the stone steps of the Ukrainian hillside port city of Odessa.

There are four images of Eisenstein himself in the picture: 1) lower left on the bridge of the Potemkin; 2) bottom center editing film; 3) bottom right directing his cameraman; and 4) drawn in outline in the sky above. The two drawings traced over the lower left portrait are from caricatures by Eisenstein, one portraying himself in an overcoat, and refer to his earlier career as a political cartoonist.

Portrait of Sergei Eisenstein
Oil on canvas
62.75"w x 51.75"h
Colin Dodd

Carl Jung

Colin Dodd

England, b. 1954

The controlled and organized stylistic diversity of this portrait of Carl Jung is a good example of Dodd's visual intellect. Reading the picture counterclockwise beginning at the bottom right, there is a multi-colored, Pointillistically painted surface indicating water from which the figure of Jung emerges. This partially submerged, three-quarter-length image of Jung is realistically rendered with the appearance of a sepia-toned, half-century-old snapshot. The expanse of water dissolves upward into a dark blue curtain-like background which covers the right one-third of the painting, and against which Jung's image risen from water is unnaturally illuminated. The abstract blue background is composed of vague vertical lines darkening leftward in hue, almost to black.

Upon this right-hand dark background, beginning sparsely and increasing in number toward the top of the painting, are bright yellow comet-like brushstrokes, which both introduce the yellowish and much lighter background of the left two-thirds of the painting, and also gradually begin what becomes a densely patterned thicket of opposing diagonal brushstrokes which diffuse, constantly change size and color, and flow counterclockwise through the rest of the picture, brilliantly interconnecting its diverse imagery. And the vague vertical lines mentioned continue leftward, variegated but less pronounced and somewhat suggesting a bamboo curtain, as a backdrop across the rest of the painting.

A large, dominant, semi-transparent portrait of Jung's head looms like a photographic double exposure over the work's left two-thirds, and is composed of white dots like video cathode rays. (This style amplifies that used for the five-circled Chinese symbol of the soul suspended above Jung's standing figure rising from water on the right.) On either side of the large looming visage is a faint film strip painted in dots in like manner. Breaking through the visage's forehead is a primitive ceremonial mask done in a colorful Expressionist style reminiscent, say, of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938). Running horizontally through the semi-transparent visage in a thin line at the middle of the painting is a silhouetted horizon of the African savanna.

After an especially intense patch of the diagonally conflicting brushstroke hatching, in the bottom left corner of the picture is a standing figure of Jung rendered in a painterly red monochrome, with a faint Chinese ideogram to its left. Finally, at the bottom center of the work, beneath the looming visage and between the left and right vertical figures of Jung, a reclining Buddha is delineated with dark blue outlines in the manner of Oriental painting. Despite the plethora of imagery, Dodd's picture seems spacious, balanced, uncrowded, serene, and masterfully controlled.

Carl Jung is a multiphasic portrait that is a sort of meditation upon the meaning of its subject's life and work. The picture employs various images of the man himself together with imagery and iconography directly relating to his work and his theories of human personality. The figure of Jung on the right, for example, is reaching for a doorknob just at the borderline where the dark right one-third of the painting ends. He could be rising from the water of Lake Geneva, on whose shore he lived, but the water really represents the human mind's great Unconscious. The doorknob Jung is reaching for presumably opens the door to his working life of developing theories about that Unconscious. This life's work is represented by the lighter, left two-thirds of the painting, all of whose imagery is pertinent to Jung's writings and his worldly, experimental activities.

For instance, the red monochrome figure of Jung, at the far left, refers to a dream he had shortly before World War I, in which he presciently saw Europe bathed in blood. Dodd's impressive ability to bind together various biographical facts and culturally diverse imagery through compositional layout, and especially through the polyvalent modulation and interweaving of painting styles, makes work like Carl Jung a quintessential example of art after Post-Modernism, and makes Colin Dodd as fine a practitioner, of this new, epoch-making movement, as there is to be found.

Carl Jung
Oil on canvas
85"w x 60"h
Colin Dodd