Alan Dodd
Alan Dodd is world-renowned for his spectacular murals, which include the Pompeiian ceiling at the Sir John Soane’s Museum; reinstating the trompe l’oeil decoration on Vardy’s balustrade for the great staircase of 1757 at Spencer House; and the Great Eating Room at Home House, 20 Portman Square.
In his more personal architectural paintings, however, Alan Dodd meditates upon the passing of time and the inevitable demise of great empires as they crumble away and surrender to the powers and rhythms of nature. Alan Dodd explains how some buildings he has painted ‘have been totally transformed by restoration, obliterating for the present any sense of the passage of time, and the picturesque qualities of decay, which, thankfully, though arrested for now, will inevitably be resumed.’
Dodd lives in the heart of Suffolk and in his painting of St Mary’s Church, Uggeshall, a picturesque building in one of the tiny villages north-east of Halesworth, he celebrates a range of different architectural textures including wattle and daub, clapboard, stucco, flint work and thatch. ‘What I couldn’t show,’ he says, ‘are the Victorian encaustic tiles inside proclaiming “My Flesh is Meat Indeed, My Blood is Drink Indeed”’. The painting of Covehithe shows the smaller seventeenth-century building standing in the ruins of the great medieval church, now within about six hundred yards of the galloping erosion of this part of the Suffolk coast.
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