Dike Blair

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, long a major hub for America’s fishing industry, became a celebrated summer resort for prominent American painters and writers including Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Cecilia Beaux and T.S. Eliot. As a young man visiting Gloucester, Edward Hopper (1882–1967) turned away from the allure of its ragged coast line and instead created atmospheric watercolors of homes, lighthouses and street scenes in Gloucester.
In this volume, art historian Robert Hobbs revisits these works from the 1920s, which he positions alongside the work of New York–based painter Dike Blair (born 1952), who, a century later, has created a new body of work centered on the small fishing city.

This book from New York–based artist Dike Blair (b. 1952) showcases his drawings from the past two years. Exploring the same imagery as his oil paintings and gouaches—ash trays, cups, mugs—allowed Blair to make his drawings "more effortless and free.

This new book brings together oil paintings from the past two years by New York–based artist Dike Blair. Blair’s still lifes of door locks, ashtrays, swimming pools, hot dogs, cigarette packets, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups and a variety of drinks and cocktails, floral bouquets, windows and light fixtures depict their subjects in painstaking fashion, but also at an often oblique angle, so that the viewer’s gaze is directed both at and beyond the ostensible subject. As Helen Molesworth writes: “Every scene he paints—the waiting areas of airports, bars, the too-harsh incandescent light on the outdoor plants at night, the blue sky out of a plane window, the seams of windows that frame the view from the bed and leave us just a glimpse of the treetops, the bare fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling—is generic … novelty is not what is at stake; familiarity is.”