| Lamar Dodd | ||
| Birth Date: September 22, 1909 |
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| Death Date: September 26, 1996 Artist Gallery |
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| In 1909 Lamar Dodd was born in Fairborn, Georgia, a small town, nineteen miles from Atlanta. At the age of 20, Dodd went to New York City to become a commercial artist and there he remained for five years. He studied at the Art Students League under George Luks and John Steuart Curry.
As the Great Depression progressed, Dodd returned to the South and located in Birmingham and there he worked in an art supply store, painting when he could.
In 1937 he joined the faculty of The University of Georgia and within a year became head of the art department. At that time the department totaled eight or nine art majors and three teachers, working in the basement of an old house. A growth in the art department occurred due largely to Dodd and by 1970 there were over seven hundred art majors, a faculty of fifty-three and they occupied thirteen buildings, including the Georgia Museum of Art.
From the late 1940s, Dodd spent summer vacations on the island of Monhegan, ten miles off the Maine coast. Many of these paintings were actually painted in his studio in Athens, Georgia. In one instance, he was working on a still life and had turned it upside-down to study the composition and found that it suggested a wave breaking on rocks, so he took another canvas, adopted the inverted design and painted The Breaker which won a prize in 1946.
In 1963 he was one of seven painters invited by NASA to record the manned orbital flight of Astronaut Gordon Cooper, and in 1969 he would again be invited to record the flight of Apollo II moon mission. Several of his paintings have been included in NASA’s collection of works devoted to the exploration of space.
Dodd wrote, “One’s study is never finished and I, as a painter, will remain a student for my entire life”.
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