Verne Dawson: To hear a story to its end

Through his chimerical landscapes, Dawson collapses prehistoric, ancient and modern human history into folkloric tableaux

Engaging ancient knowledge systems as well as the long history of direct painting, Alabama-born artist Verne Dawson (born 1955) depicts imagined futures and forgotten pasts. In billowing, gestural marks that often evanesce into abstraction, and working from both observation and memory, the artist contends with subjects including the cyclicality of time, fairy tales and folklore, Ice Age symbolism, astronomy and the emergence and destruction of the natural world, ultimately revealing their interconnectedness. Dawson's paintings, Jennifer Krasinski writes, "call upon viewers to practice a quality of depth perception to see what other wisdoms are stowed inside of symbolic orders and archetypes, popular objects and classic genres-and to better apprehend all that is known of this world and those that spin alongside it." The selected paintings in this richly illustrated volume span from 1985 to 2024.