Painting Outside the Box

This exhibition is titled "In the Round," but it could easily have been called "Unbound." Followers of Lisa Dinhofer's work will recall that her last show featured creatures, marbles, and other objects depicted behind, caught within, and floating precariously above a spider web. No such entangling barrier exists in this current group of paintings and highly finished preparatory drawings from the New York City artist. Boundaries have been removed in another sense, too: By creating these pieces in the round, Dinhofer strongly discouraged the use of a decorative frame around these paintings. Visually, the absence of a rectangular box--which most standard painting canvases suggest--gives the artist the freedom to keep her compositions dynamically swirling in exuberant movement, marbles (sometimes dressed up as planets) traveling or hovering in gridded or otherwise heavily perspectived space. For some time, Dinhofer has exploited the versatile, alluring, amusing microcosms visible in glass marbles. She continues this in her current presentation of paintings and drawings, in which the marbles’ round shape reinforces the circular nature of the painting surfaces, and their world-within-a world trait echoes the same kind of world-building Dinhofer creates in each of her pieces. But now the sphere, which has represented infinity for centuries, lends its limitless air to the very surface of her work.

If you ask Dinhofer about her choice of marbles as subject matter, she’s first going to quickly point out that marbles are beautiful, colorful, unusual objects that you can play with. Each marble is unique, and each manipulates light in a different way, fracturing colors and shadows and changing the look of nearby objects. The changes each marble effects is subtle, at least for most of us. But they stand a bit larger for Dinhofer, a true artist, which can be defined as someone who makes it his or her business to see the world in a thorough and curious way—and feels compelled to share the resulting, fascinating observations. Not many people would bother to notice the tinge of red in the far shadow of that orangey marble. Dinhofer will make a point of painting it. She duly notes: Move a marble several inches in any direction and the painting changes, not just in terms of composition, but also in terms of color, light, and the reflections that the artist must paint into the surface of many of the neighboring spheres.

Meticulousness is everywhere in these wholly imagined scenes. Look closely at one of the reflective marbles and you’ll discern the shape of the windows on two walls of Dinhofer’s studio, light sources that fix the piece in her Soho residence, making each marble a world that lives within her material world, a new place where Dinhofer can exercise control, obsessiveness, light effects, imagination, and strange physics. “Lately I’ve been fighting against gravity,” says the artist. “I don’t like the idea of gravity being in my still lifes, that everything needs to be anchored to a table.” Dinhofer usually creates a setup for her dimensional pieces, building out her vision with boards and painted paper and other materials, often stacking several levels of Lucite platforms onto which she can layer objects, then peer down through them to see a scene of significant depth. For one of the most striking pieces in this show, “Kaleidescope,” she designed a setup that she observed from a horizontal standpoint, with the marbles either hanging down from dowels or held up on wire pedestals—her battle with gravity. Her mind’s eye had to remove the supports and imagine the resulting change in the light effects. The light source was, as in all her paintings, only the sunlight that disperses its gentle light from the room’s west- and north-facing windows. Dinhofer’s self-portrait, or at least her silhouette, is discernible in between the window shapes in several marbles.

Each marble—and each square in “Kaleidescope’s” checkerboard background—is rimmed with vibrant color, which pushes the object forward by making its edge vibrate. “There are some Thiebaud moments in my paintings,” admits Dinhofer, referring to the California painter Wayne Thiebaud. “Especially in the use of color to give the illusion of three-dimensionality.” But while that modern master slathers on the paint like so much luscious frosting, Dinhofer walks a line between painterly brushstrokes and nearly indistinguishable marks that more easily allow the illusion of realism.

When she is in the middle of a painting, the marbles come to life one by one, each “world” created according to the artist’s whim that day and in answer to what the painting needs. But the general composition and color scheme has long been planned out. Dinhofer’s process begins with a black-and-white drawing in one of her drawing books—large, custom-made, clothbound notebooks filled with heavy paper Dinhofer bought separately and delivered to her bookbinder. (These wonderful books are treasures no collector will ever own, but Dinhofer does seem willing to show them to people interested in taking a colorful, magical walk through her creative thoughts.) In that first black-and-white drawing, she is working out the composition and the values. Sometimes Dinhofer photocopies an appropriate marble from a previous painting and affixes it to her drawing to speed things along. Her drawing books are also filled with additional reference material she generates once the composition has come together and dictated the use of certain objects. Gorgeous renderings of monarch butterflies in colored pencil sit on one page of a drawing book, intriguing watercolor and colored pencil depictions of a solar eclipse that Dinhofer witnessed fill another. (She was thrilled to find an example in nature of a sphere rimmed in color, just like her painted marbles.)

The creation of a color version of the composition follows, in colored pencil, then the artist magnifies the image by making a nearly full-size version also in colored pencil to see how the piece will work on a larger scale. “An object is slightly different in each media—a marble 'changes' when you draw it in colored pencil after drawing it in graphite,” says Dinhofer. “Plus, it’s a good way to learn about an object, depicting it in several media.” Visitors to this show would do well to linger at those two-foot drawings. Of particular note is one of her studies for "Light Travelers 1 and 2." This pair of paintings, in which dragonflies, bees, marbles, and butterflies move down a cold blue tube toward a sunny, warm light, were drawn side-by-side on one sheet so Dinhofer could explore the possibility of treating them as a diptych. (She decided against it.) Careful viewers will note that the individual studies for "Light Travelers 1 and 2" differ in that the drawing for "Light Traveler 1" utilizes collage--several of the objects were drawn in colored pencil on separate sheets of paper and affixed to the background with archival glue.

As a result, the objects feel slightly more dimensional as they sit on top of the surface, enhancing the piece's feeling of depth. Finally, note that the studies for the paintings set in outer space are drawn in colored pencil on black paper. Starting on this dark value completely changes the feel of the composition, placing it in the darkest reaches of deep space, and accentuating the cobwebby curls of mist around the foreground planets in "Study for Orbit Fantasies."

With the studies drawn and the composition and color scheme set, the artist is ready to start painting on a 7-ply gessoed and sanded birch plywood panel. With all her preparatory work behind her, Dinhofer can focus on seeing the colors that are borne on the reflected light from the marbles in her setup, and she can begin to craft the worlds within her painting’s world. The artist readily admits her obsession with this stage, explaining with excitement, “It’s a challenge to see light coming from seven or so different directions and to document that. And to remember that the most important part of a painting is the space between the objects, the negative space. That’s the hardest part to paint, but it’s where the poetry is.”

It was a short hop from painting the world inside each marble to painting marbles as worlds—planets—in an imagined portion of outer space. This recent group of paintings includes such explorations, with the oval piece “Orbit Fantasies” moving the spheres out of Dinhofer’s typical vortex, which appears straight ahead of the viewer in most of her paintings, and instead places them a distance away in a swirling galaxy of warm and cool color. All are rimmed just slightly with color, as if in eternal eclipse in Dinhofer’s mind’s eye. In her other work the spheres and objects move about the gridded vortex in essentially random fashion (save the purposeful insects that move toward the warm light in both “Light Travelers 1 and 2”). But in one new outer space painting, “Space Dream,” the planets, which seem filled with more personality than usual, appear to be marching into the distance in an orderly fashion, evenly dispersed and nearly organized. The marbles’ arrangement brings a calmness to the scene, and the dimples below the foreground planets suggest softly rippling water displaced by the planet’s movements. But the round shape of the painting retains the limitless theme; the unbounded feel is sustained. The reddish-orange cloud in the background injects a mild dose of surrealism. We’re in a dream. And like all of Lisa Dinhofer’s dreams, it is populated with luxuriant color, loving detail, and convincing depth. It’s a celebration of what she sees, opened up to us through Dinhofer’s superb technique. Unbound and in the round.

--Bob Bahr

Managing Editor of American Artist magazine