Dorothy Robinson’s family moved often during her childhood, starting in rural Iowa, where they farmed for generations and eventually settled in California. After high school, she bounced between colleges before landing at UC Berkeley. Studying art never crossed her mind, but she was drawn to geography, “probably because of its strong visual component—map making, field trips, slide shows,” Robinson says. During an internship, she learned darkroom skills and later worked in commercial photo labs, shaping her sense of color while making color prints. An invitation from an artist friend to join a drawing group was transformative, and started Robinson on the path to a life of making art.
Let’s take a look at your body of work. If I were to find a broad definition of your work, I would say Landscape painting. Do you see yourself as a landscape painter?
I am not sure what kind of painter I am, but I do see my paintings as landscapes. Elements of nature seem to emerge from the paint as it accumulates on a surface. It acquires the quality and feeling of one or more landscapes, moving around and popping in and out. Some kind of foreground usually appears along the bottom edge of the painting, anchoring and pulling the elements together.
How do you converse with landscape painting through art history?
Looking at representations of landscapes from other cultures and eras expanded my notions about what landscape painting could be. For example, with early Asian scrolls and the Dreamings of Indigenous Australians, the artists move us through space and time rather than depicting a single moment from a single vantage point. In Indian/Persian miniatures, backgrounds don’t recede but instead move upwards and retain the same scale as the foreground. The painting’s various elements are assigned equal importance, and everything happens at once.
Back in the Western tradition, I never get tired of looking at early Northern European painters—Joachim Patinir and Breugel are two favorites. Their landscapes are imaginative and approachable. People are depicted as a part of their surroundings, and we’re invited into their world. In America, I admire the skills of the Hudson River Valley painters but feel much more at home with the landscapes of Charles Burchfield, Albert Pinkham Ryder, or Marsden Hartley. Instead of painting what they see, they paint their experience of what they see. I can respond to and connect to that.
On your website, you divide your paintings into three timeframes: 2004-09, 2010—19, and recent. Can you give us some insight on – Why these specific timeframes?
The three timeframes correspond more or less to three distinct eras of my life since moving to New York in 2004. The Recession altered my circumstances and brought the first era, 2004–09, to a close. Between 2010–19, my work reflected numerous personal transitions, growing apprehension about global conditions, and a new, stabilizing live/work environment in the Hudson Valley. With Covid, a completely new era arrived in early 2020, and I’m still in that timeframe. I see these works as a group, connected to each other.
Let’s look at your earlier work, for instance, Continental Drift II from 2009. What is the genesis and process of making this 54×103” oil on canvas?
In 2009, there weren’t any jobs, so I left town for a residency at VCCA, dragging along a roll of canvas. The large-scale, extra-long format allowed me to spread out, and the painting took on a narrative quality, encompassing past, present, and future. This painting might have been a prelude to my scrolls.
Let’s go to your scrolls. I am curious to see how you relate your scrolls to your paintings.
The rice paper scrolls started out as a substitute for painting, because at that time I didn’t have a studio or much money for oil painting supplies. I continued making them for some years because I loved the materials, and working on rolls of paper eliminated the spatial restrictions of painting, something I’d never really thought about. With the scrolls, I didn’t run out of room, didn’t have to resolve a composition, and I couldn’t go back to make changes. I could only move forward, and I guess that was the point of them.
In Full House, from 2016, the landscape seems more abstract yet more intricate in floral detail. This painting is almost surreal and strikes me as different from the others in this period. Can you tell us about this painting, its title, imagery, and process?
The floral elements appeared first, and I wanted them to flow into and around each other. The yellow background came later, well after the painting was underway. I wanted the yellow to suggest several things in several places – for instance, receding terrain, sky, water. With all this, the painting started looking crowded, with a few sinister pockets. But I didn’t want to take out any of the parts because the paint itself looked bold and confident. Hence the name, Full House.
You seem to explore a more limited palette in some of your recent paintings. All That, from 2024, appears to be about Blue, and End of Story, from 2022, takes us from primarily yellow to purple. Can you give us some insight into your approach to color in these paintings?
I started End of Story with titanium orange pigment mixed in linseed oil. Orange usually strikes me as brash and domineering, but this particular paint is different — it has a slightly translucent quality and light texture and produces surprising results when mixed with other colors. I used it with dioxazine purple, resulting in the painting’s brownish, purplish reddish hues.
In the painting prior to All That, (Goin for It, 2024), pretty much every color of the rainbow ended up in it.. With All That, I decided to limit my color choices. I’d accumulated a whole range of blue pigments and decided to see if they could all work together in the same painting.
In Under Cover, you create a dramatic sense of darkness and delicate glimpses of light. Unlike the limited palette in All That, your palette range here is vast. The details run from a lone tree on the (broken) horizon to the prism-like shapes that erupt from the middle ground, resembling shattered fauna and flora. For me, this landscape strikes particularly deep and nuanced psychological chords. Can you elaborate on this painting?
This piece is from 2021 when we were still in the grip of Covid. I was frustrated by the painting’s square format and kept wanting to crawl into that dark green space on the lower left and come out the other side. Time and space seemed to be standing still, and those vertical shards of color conveyed a stilted, frozen quality. One day, I saw a sweet little tree in the woods, brightly illuminated against a very dark green background, and I wanted it to be in the painting.
What are you working on now?
This summer, I’m making some small plein-air paintings and preparing to start two large-scale paintings that I hope will carry me through the election. Fingers crossed!
About the artist: Dorothy Robinson is a NY-based painter who lives and works in Hudson Valley. She earned a bachelor’s degree in geography (1979) and an MFA in painting (1993) from UC Berkeley, and moved to New York City in 2004. Artist residencies have been key to the development of her work; these include the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in NYC, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Arts, and Monson Arts. Robinson’s work has been exhibited in New York and elsewhere on the East and West Coasts, most recently at Les Yeux du Monde in Charlottesville, VA, and 547 Madison Ave., NYC. She has received financial support from several arts organizations, including the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2008), Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation (2015), Tree of Life (2022), and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2024).