VERNE DAWSON

Dawson’s recent paintings centre around a spring near the artist’s home in the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina. As depicted by Dawson, whose approach, unmediated by contemporary technology, foregrounds the primacy of subject, artist, and paint, the spring becomes a place outside of time, at once enchanted and very real.

In Karma’s new monograph on Dawson, critic Jennifer Krasinski hones in on the artist’s atemporal ambitions, writing that “he devoted himself to painting because it offers ‘the much-desired possibility to escape time,’ eluding the dupe finitudes (like now and then) and instead calling attention . . . to time’s suppleness.” His monumental canvas Saluda Crystal Springs (2025) invites the viewer to step into the utopic spaces of the spring and painting itself. While the location is specific, the temporality is an open question. Across nearly fourteen feet, swaths of oil swirl and curlicue, together forming a fantastical landscape populated by a number of nude figures in pairs—without clothes to ground us in a particular era, we are further dislocated from time. Vines snake up trees; the waters are vibrantly blue and yellow; the sun bounces off of the top of a distant mountain. As in the monumental landscape paintings from the Song and Yuan dynasties that are among Dawson’s wide-ranging inspirations, the artist hopes to emphasise humans’ diminutive scale in the face of expansive nature.

The calligraphically forested Pot Shoals (2024) focuses on one couple as they wade through the springs’ clear water, its aquamarine hue mirrored in the sky above. In the dense trees that frame them, Dawson’s use of the complementary colours orange and green creates a firework-like pop of leaves and vines. Through the Forest (2024) represents a procession of figures walking down to the waters in a style that borders on abstraction; clouds and trees billow above and around them in elemental, gestural whorls redolent of Abstract Expressionism. Through his impassioned renderings of the Crystal Springs, Dawson channels a love of nature and a respect for our place in it.

In the rear gallery, the trompe-l’œil Steampunk (2015/2024) bridges Dawson’s enveloping, out-of-time paintings of the springs with a selection of smaller works of urban and technological subjects—21st Street (2015), Friday Night (2024), and Bi-Plane (2013). A painting of a painting of a jet and a biplane flying over a verdant forest encircled by a stream, Steampunk comments at once on the asynchronicity of modern life and the constructed nature of Dawson’s medium. A painted Post-it note inscribed with the work’s title beside the canvas at the centre of the composition pulls the viewer out of the fantasy of painting as a portal into another world, returning them to the reality of the present.