PAINTINGS / IMAGES

NYSS (1990s)

At age sixty, after earning her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, Lois Dickson enrolled in the New York Studio School’s full-time Certificate Program, studying under Graham Nickson in the 1990s. The Studio School’s emphasis on observation, sustained looking, and rigorous studio practice became the foundation of her approach to painting, shaping the work she would make over the following decades.

Plein Air (2000–2010s)

In the late 1990s, she began splitting her time between New York City and the Hudson Valley, seizing every opportunity to paint outdoors. “Painting outdoors is one of the most exciting places to paint. It is difficult. It’s hard to get it all together because of continual changes, but when it works, and the day has constant light, and the wind doesn’t blow too hard… being able to execute a plein air painting is pure joy.” Plein air painting reinforced Dickson’s interest in nature and perceptual painting.

Fungi (2002–2004)

Fungi are among the most recurring visual motifs throughout Dickson’s forty years of oil paintings, stemming from her lifelong fascination with horticulture and forest ecologies. These forms appear in early representational works, often painted plein air or from watercolor studies, and persist as visual memories throughout later landscapes and abstractions alike.“ I used to collect mushrooms in the woods when I was a child and make gardens out of them. I would find Indian Pipes and line them up in large hollowed-out pieces of bark. I always identified with the shape.”

Travel (2002–2014)

In 2002, Dickson traveled to the Namib desert, where she studied and photographed the native Welwitschia Mirabilis—a Jurassic-era plant found only along the southwestern coast of Africa. Upon returning home, she painted prolifically, and became increasingly comfortable using photography as a point of departure. Collecting photographs, sketches, and memories of textures, forms, and colors became common practice. From her travels through South America, Yellowstone, the far East, the marshes of South Carolina, and her own backyard, objects from the natural world accumulated into an expanding archive of visual inspiration. She still has a closet full of stones, bones, and shells. Collage, fragmented imagery, and inventive uses of photographic reference became central in Dickson’s practice. From this uniquely observational yet intuitive process emerged an interplay of organic form and geometry that would later become a defining feature of her work, most notably through the diamond grid that acts as a loose architecture throughout her compositions. “As time goes by things beyond the obvious interest me—the source material evolves, the way I feel about the memory evolves, what I notice evolves.”

Improvisations (2009–2014)

While deeply inspired by painting outdoors and her travel diaries, Dickson remained committed to the act of painting itself. In 2009, she began working on a series of paintings entirely from imagination.To offset regiment, she turned to heavy texture, coating the canvas in thick primer, allowing the randomly generated textures to guide her painting in the absence of an image. These “improvisations” became an essential part of her practice, offering a space for experimentation and surprise.

Source (2013–2014)

During a trip to the Grand Canyon, she was struck by a singular mountain formation that later became the basis for Source, a major transitional work. Unable to “physically carry the landscape” with her, she translated its forms spontaneously through memory and abstraction. Source marked a synthesis between observed landscape, photo collage, and the imaginative image-making of her Improvisations. Rather than reproducing the desert landscape faithfully, Source, and the large body of paintings that grew from it, focused on transforming the recurring, ambiguous natural forms of the landscape into their own visual language.

Abstraction (2015–2017)

During the mid-2010s, inspired by Source and the Improvisations, Dickson had fully embraced abstraction. She continued to explore the diamond grid, scaling it up to a large “X”, which served as a prominent compositional guide in this series. Working first on small panels, she developed a process grounded in this structure, while remaining open to uncertainty and surprise. “I like a surprise, even to surprise myself. They really did just come—I just painted.”

Grid (2018–2019)

Following travels to Vietnam and Cambodia, a body of paintings emerged which reflect the region’s waterways, caves, and dense vegetation. Although these paintings utilize the diamond grid, they often depart from earlier works through more liberated gestural marks. Drawing on the same responsive process that informed her abstract work, Dickson painted what she encountered as evocative abstractions, privileging sensation and recollection over direct representation. The caves and rock formations of Vietnam deepened Dickson’s interest in hidden imagery, which she continued to explore when painting local sites such as Dover Stone Church, hiding ambiguous faces, creatures, and geological forms throughout. “The creatures are there if you look, if you want them to be.”

2020s-present

Drawing from Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, Vietnam, and the Hudson Valley, Dickson’s recent paintings collapse the distinctions between monumental and microscopic. She reflects on and finds humor in her enduring fascination with perception, possibility, and ambiguity; the work invites viewers to search for imagery secreted within their compositions. The artist continues to discover new ideas and processes. Most recently, she began taking photos of everyday objects using a micro-lens, adding these visual references to her ever-growing collection of source material.