Contemporary realist painter Wayne Dodson (Richmond, Virginia) trained originally in Graphic Design; he earned a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and worked as an illustrator and graphic designer until 2006 when he started to work full time as an artist. His paintings have received numerous awards of distinction in juried shows both regionally and nationally, and his works hang in private collections throughout the country.
“Art, in my view, doesn’t have to be about any particular thing to be good, and the ‘content’ of most good art comes not from the mind of the artist, but from the heart of the viewer,” Dodson says. “Despite being a representational painter I work within the confines of a deceptively simple visual vocabulary of physical forms, light and shadow, and textures, with an over-arching abstract element of design. I find meaning in the play of light against time-worn materials and feel kinship with the gritty violence of shattered surfaces. In my work you will find a distinct sensibility toward ordinary care-worn structures and surfaces, with scars, gouges, and stresses; the ontological inner dynamic of the struggle of all things brought to visual form.”
“My approach to painting varies, but is most often a collaboration between myself and random chaos,” he says. “I have a perennial obsession with texture and the play of light, and the textures in my work are often unplanned, coming out of the process of working. I will stress and re-work the surface of my ground, or splatter and mix paint with unusual materials, until I feel I have established a presence, a fullness of textured surface, which I then light and shade in a way that resonates with me, that seems most appropriate to establish my overall intent.”
“I prefer to use no external source material to draw from: the painting then becomes an invented image in an invented world. It usually has no conscious symbolic meaning, and hopefully has no reference outside itself. The ambition is not so much to express any particular thing, but to produce a work with the strength to pull meaning from the viewer, to be complete, finished, only in that singular moment when the viewer recognizes a personal truth reflected back at them. The viewer then, in a sense, is an unwitting collaborator. If successful, the work will stay with the viewer, stay in their mind, in their memory, in their heart…Move them in a way words never will.”
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