AnnieDillard

By Ann Landi, Art News, March 2010

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, and memoirist Annie Dillard - best known for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a Stone to Talk - is also a talented and prolific painter. Largely self-taught, Dillard generally works in oil and gouache and always on a small scale, her canvases rarely more than 16 inches to a side. A self-portrait made when she was in her early thirties shows her wielding a brush and looking rather morose about it, but other works, including some landscapes, reveal an ebullience and a sure sense of color and line.

Dillard is a writer lauded as a dedicated observer of the outdoors and, not surprisingly, many of her paintings depict the water and terrain around her homes on Cape Cod, in the Virginia Mountains, and in Key West, as well as vistas of Montana and Maine. Often she reduces a scene to its bare essentials, as in Montana (1990s) and Montana II (1990s), the latter featuring a dense copse of bluish trees silhouetted against a pale lavender sky. Flat Hills (1990s) is similarly schematic, and in spite of its tiny size (nine by seven inches) suggests the monumentality of sweeping clouds and a green hill dwarfing a small red house. One of the most fanciful works, Nutty Island (1990s), seems to portray an imaginary isle with mushroom-shaped trees and exotic yellow flora reflected in pastel waters.

Occasionally Dillard ventures into a quasi-cubist style, but she's at her strongest when she keeps the motifs simple and the colors sprightly. While there are echoes of modernist movements in her paintings, Dillard's voice, here, as in her writing, is very much her own: assured, perceptive and sometimes dazzling.

- Ann Landi