Ink on Paper

Modern abstract drawing by early female Texas artist Dorothy Hood. The work features a central, nest-like shape with organic forms throughout. Signed in the front lower right corner. Currently hung in a white floating frame.

Abstract surrealist painter Dorothy Hood, was born in Bryan, Texas in 1918, and her life and work embraced much of the 20th Century in Mexico and the United States where she was regarded as a pioneer because of her exceptional use of color and daring techniques. She was a prolific painter who created many large-scale canvases washed with intense colors. Other mediums for her were ink drawing, printing and collages. Hood traveled to Mexico in 1941 after studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, and Art Students League, New York City, where, in her early to mid-twenties, she became part of the circle of leading artists and writers of Europe and Mexico. She married Bolivian composer Velasco Maidana, a Bolivian conductor and composer, and spent the next nineteen years in Mexico, but also traveled widely including in Central, South and North America. Hood was in New York studying during most of 1945. There she was influenced by James Thrall Soby's book, After Picasso, and produced some drawings, one of which was shown by a friend of hers to Soby, an important curatorial figure at the Museum of Modern Art. He liked her work and this meant that Dorothy Hood was twenty-seven years old, and exhibiting with Picasso and Matisse in an exhibition sponsored by a major American museum. In 1950 at age thirty two, Hood had a solo exhibition at the Willard Gallery at a time when it was difficult for women to gain exhibitions. She was back in Texas with her husband in 1961, and she became a prominent teacher at the Houston School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts. The couple found the city exciting as their first years there were years of much fascination with the first man landing on the moon. Hood was profoundly affected by the American space program and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and later said they inspired her to turn her brushes and paints toward the vastness of the universe. From 1962, she began exhibiting her work at a major gallery in Houston, and had five one-person exhibitions at major Texas museums since 1971. A poet as well as a painter, Dorothy Hood has had two films made about her: From the Heart, 1982, and Dorothy Hood: The Color of Life, 1985. She died on November 3, 2000, at the age of 82.

H 31 in. x W 24.75 in. x D 1.5 in.

H 26 in. x W 20 in.