Jane Dickson's figurative painting, drawings, and prints offer nostalgic and dream-like reveries of American life, often painted on unconventional surfaces such as Astroturf, carpet, vinyl, insulation, and sandpaper.
Read MoreDrawn to the flourescent signage of Times Square, Dickson painted numerous images of night-time scenes in the neighbourhood in which she lived for almost three decades. Paradise Alley (1983), among many others, was painted from her 6th floor window, looking down on 8th Avenue and 43rd Street.
Her images depict Times Square's seedy hotels and apartments, as well as its many pornographic movie theatres, strip clubs, and stores selling adult entertainment. Critic Glenn O'Brien once said of her paintings in a 1988 issue of ArtForum, 'They present beauty as the incidental by-product of the American way of life.' More recent paintings such as Dreams 2 (2018), Cameo 2 (2019), and Devil Below (2020) nostalgically revisit these scenes.
Jane Dickinson's 'Peepland' series from the 1990s portray the seedy underside of Times Square in the 1980s. Saturated in warm red tones, the paintings depict the peep shows and erotic live performances endemic at the time. Claustrophobically framed in restrictive compositions such as circular canvases, they convey the voyeuristic sensation of these illicit pursuits.
Dickson continues to explore these themes in paintings such as 3 Graces (2017), a red-saturated peep show triptych with obvious art historical references.
In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, Dickson's artistic influence expanded from the lights of the city to the homes and ordinary spaces of America's suburbs. Depicting frontal profiles of suburban homes in oil paint on thick carpet, her 'Almost Home' paintings possess a moody atmospheric haze evoking dreamlike sensations of memory. Later paintings like Savon 1 (2002) and Auto Zone (2007) offer a hazy vision of local streets and commercial spaces painted on AstroTurf.
While people often appear within the environments Dickson creates, the artist has also focused exclusively on the human figure. Dickson's 'Revelers' paintings (1990) present portraits of drunken and jubilant party-goers. In her 'Trust Me' series (1991–2015), the artist presents muted black-and-white portraits of friends, artists, musicians, and pets, as well as herself, in a signature tondo format.
