Forty Years of Painting presents an overview of Lois Dickson’s paintings across her prolific career, situating new works alongside a wide-spanning practice. Ranging from geometric abstraction to organic form, this diverse body of work traces the breadth of Dickson’s technical explorations, the natural development of key motifs, and her playful approach to painting.

“No piece is ever truly finished,” says the artist who works intuitively from life, memory, photo, and her imagination. Her paintings are “constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed over days, weeks, often years.” Paintings made decades apart often bleed into one another. Echoes of the overtly organic shapes of fungi, rocks, and foliage, found in many of Dickson’s paintings, appear throughout even her most abstract work, including a new series inspired by photographs taken with a magnifying camera Lens.

The artist works from life and a collection of source materials–drawings, photographs, and studies–welcoming experimentation and spontaneity, often landing somewhere between transcription and abstraction. Spontaneous gestures follow a grid-like structure which underlines many of her paintings. Originally used as a compositional guide, the diamond grid gradually became an integral part of Dickson’s visual language. Sometimes it remains visible beneath the paint; elsewhere it quietly structures the composition before dissolving into gesture and color. At times, the paintings depart from this visual language entirely, and are composed spontaneously around texture, color, and form.

“It’s all open to interpretation and speculation,” explains Dickson. She hopes her paintings will invite multiple readings and interpretations, via unique avenues of personal connection. She is especially “happy when humor finds its way into the mix.”