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.

Working from his own photographs of subjects such as cigarette packets, blossoming flowers, snacks, liquor glasses and coffee cups, doors and desolate, nighttime scenes, New York–based artist Dike Blair (born 1952) creates intimate, diaristic tableaux paintings. His depictions of food evoke the soft palette and bird's-eye perspective of Wayne Thiebaud, while his window views and landscapes combine the modernism of Edward Hopper with the photorealistic eye of William Eggleston. After using gouache for decades, Blair began working in oil in 2017; the resulting noirish scenes retain the artist’s signature style, but imbue his works with a particular novel luster. This expansive monograph presents Blair’s paintings in oil to date. Illustrated with hundreds of recent works, the book features a reprint of a formative 2018 essay on the artist by Helen Molesworth, as well as new scholarship by Jim Lewis and Christine Robinson.

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.”