One of the largest, most striking canvases in Lois Dickson’s new show at the Time & Space Limited (TSL) gallery in Hudson, New York, Forty Years of Painting, involves Welwitschia Mirabilis. It’s a plant that survives only in the deserts of Namibia. And it’s known for its extraordinary longevity - it can live more than a thousand years - amid one of the planet’s most hostile environments.
As we walked through the show last week Lois noted her admiration for the plant; her depiction of it hovers somewhere between representation and abstraction, the dramatic cascading foliage providing a backdrop for strange pollen producing cones. She came to admire the vegetation’s resilience on a trip to Namibia in 2002 with her granddaughter.
The artist didn’t draw any parallels between the indomitable plant and her own life, so I will. At 96-years-old she almost died in recent months but, flummoxing her doctors and her family, rallied so remarkably that at the show’s Oct. 10 opening, she circulated among well-wishers for a couple of hours, rarely, if ever, pausing to rest. The show runs through Nov. 8.
“It’s a very funny feeling to come back from what somebody tells you is near death,” she observed while sipping a Coke. “It’s hard to take it seriously.”
Lois didn’t even begin to paint until she was 60-years-old. However, she saw her successful decades long business career as a corporate art consultant and lead curator for major corporations such as Exxon, Prudential and Time-Life as good preparation.
“I thought it would be easy to paint because I knew so much,” she recalled, regarding her frequent visits to art galleries in search of work for her clients’ walls. She added mischievously, “But what I knew was how bad the paintings were.”
She went on, “If you’re good at color at one thing you can be good at color in lots of things.”
The artist makes the leap from buying art to creating it, sound easier than it was. “I worked very hard,” she acknowledged. After leaving the corporate world she spent seven years at art school; earning a masters in fine arts at the New York Academy of Art and Honors in Drawing from the New York Studio School’s full time Certificate program.
It’s hard to pigeonhole the artist’s style. It ranges from colorful abstracts inspired by Lois’s travels to places such as the Grand Canyon, to Hudson Valley landscapes whose underlying geometry, reminiscent of Cubism, is filled with hidden images and creatures.
Lois didn’t disagree when her partner, Andy Humphrey, said that at the start of her career, or rather at the start of her second career, she didn’t take the work that seriously.
“Now I do,” she stated emphatically.
She credits Humphrey, a former Wall Street executive a decade her junior and his fascination with the artistic process, for turning what could have been an avocation between ladies lunches, into a daily disciple. In recent years, Lois built a home and studio alongside Humphrey’s in Old Chatham, New York. She retreats there to paint after breakfast, often for the whole day.
What unites all of the work - the more than 60 canvases are spread across several large galleries at TSL - is a passion for exploration that dates back to childhood when she took trips with her family to the Adirondacks and collected wonders from the forest floor.
“It’s a tendency to be aware,” Lois said.
It’s probably no surprise that her paintings of fungi are especially confident. So are a couple of ink, pastel and charcoal drawings that capture the forest’s ecology. The exhibition is expertly curated by Pamela Salisbury, the artist’s daughter, and until recently the owner of her own well-regarded gallery in Hudson, and Alice Finta who created the show’s illuminating catalogue.
Stories appear daily that attempt to unlock the secret to living to old age. They include good genes, obviously. And those who approach the century mark are said to have a talent for pushing away unpleasant things. But I suspect another ingredient, for those lucky enough to find it, is a daily practice that allows you to live in the moment.
“I didn’t realize what a blessing I had,” Lois confessed. “To have this thing to go to that you believe in.”
She’s eager to return to her work. But she’s not interested in retracing familiar steps. Inspired by the artist David Hockney she’s been taking lots of photographs as source material. She’s as curious about what comes next as her fans are.
“I’m wanting to do some figurative work,” she told me. She briefly paused before adding, “It’s an important beginning, I think.”
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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