Lamar Dodd (September 22, 1909 - September 21, 1996) was a U.S. painter whose work reflected a love of the

American South The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, or simply the South) is a geographic and cultural region of the United States of America. It is between the Atlantic Ocean ...

Early life and education

Born in Fairburn, Georgia, to Rev. Francis Jefferson Dodd and Etta Cleveland (

Ed Dodd Edward Benton Dodd (November 7, 1902 – May 27, 1991) was a 20th-century American cartoonist known for his '' Mark Trail'' comic strip. Early years Born in Lafayette, Georgia to Reverend Jesse Mercer Dodd and Effie Cook Dodd (the artist Lamar D ...

, creator of the ''

Mark Trail ''Mark Trail'' is a newspaper comic strip created by the American cartoonist Ed Dodd. Introduced April 15, 1946, the strip centers on environmental and ecological themes. As of 2020, King Features syndicated the strip to "nearly 150 newspaper ...

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

, was his first cousin) and reared in LaGrange, Georgia, Dodd trained in the South, including a short stay at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Career

He taught art in Alabama before traveling to New York City to study under advocates of the Ashcan School of painting as well as to gain a nativist perspective from the paintings of artists such as Thomas Hart Benton. He specifically studied under the draughtsman George Bridgman and the painter George Luks. He returned to Birmingham, Alabama, determined to champion local art. Over a long and productive career his styles encompassed naturalism and

expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

and extended to

abstract art Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th ...

. Dodd was also a university teacher and administrator. Appointed as an artist in residence at the University of Georgia, in Athens, in 1937, he became the head of the art department several years later. Dodd consolidated art instruction into a unified department and initiated a master's degree program. The

Lamar Dodd School of Art The Lamar Dodd School of Art is the art school of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia, United States. History In 1927, the University of Georgia’s board of trustees voted to esta ...

at the University of Georgia is named in his memory. Dodd became a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1954, and was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. In 1958 his painting ''Cathedral Number 1'' was acquired for the collection at Lehigh University by prominent alumnus Ralf Wilson after it was shown in a contemporary art exhibition curated by Francis J. Quirk.

References

History of the University of Georgia, Thomas Walter Reed, Imprint: Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia, ca. 1949, pp. 3026-3033

External links

Lamar Dodd School of Art websiteLamar Dodd
at the New Georgia Encyclopedia
Hodgson-Dodd Park
historical marker (side 1)
Hodgson-Dodd Park
historical marker (side 2) 1909 births 1996 deaths Georgia Tech alumni University of Georgia faculty 20th-century American painters American male painters Artists from Georgia (U.S. state) People from Fairburn, Georgia National Academy of Design members 20th-century American male artists {{UGeorgia-stub