Lot 291, Auction 4/20/2026: Lockwood Dennis Painting – “Grand Junction” (2002)

$325.00

In stock

Lockwood “Woody” Dennis (American, 1937-2012). “Grand Junction” oil on canvas, 2002. Signed at lower right and dated on verso. A rugged skyline of stone and silence rises against a warm-toned sky in this 2002 painting by Lockwood ‘Woody’ Dennis, capturing the sculptural grandeur of Grand Junction, Colorado, with the artist’s unmistakable visual rhythm. Rendered in oil on canvas, the composition is both elemental and expressive, a study in geological form transformed into graphic abstraction. Dennis organizes the mesa into a series of bold, dark-lined ridges, each echoing the next like chords in a visual melody. Their layered geometry, marked with inverted chevrons and angular slopes, hints at both erosion’s patient force and the symbolic patterns of Indigenous petroglyphs. The palette is spare and deliberate – dusky ochres and siennas warmed by a pale lavender sky and grounded by a fringe of dark green trees, the only interruption to the stone’s dominance. Size: 14″ W x 11″ H (35.6 cm x 27.9 cm)

Best known for his painterly yet graphic style, Dennis drew from early Modernism, Japanese woodblock prints, and WPA-era design. Here, those influences find fertile ground in the Western landscape. Like so many of his works, “Grand Junction” is less a topographical study than a meditation – a memory made visual, a place that has filtered through experience and emotion before arriving on canvas. As always with Dennis, this is a painting concerned not only with what is seen, but with what is remembered: the silence of stone, the abstraction of time, and the subtle human longing to order nature into lines that can be held and understood.

Lockwood “Woody” Dennis was driven to paint throughout his 45-year career and each canvas reveals new aspects about him as a person – his approaches to life, the environment, and art. During the early years, Woody was most influenced by the works of Post-Impressionist pioneers of early Modernism such as Cezanne and Matisse. As he evolved, Woody developed a graphic style that was informed by the style and imagery he created for his woodblock prints.

Dennis was quite eloquent and insightful when asked about his art. The following is an excerpt from the “On Impetus” section of his “Philosophical Musings on Painting”: “The impetus to paint is always an experience – a specific place, weather, ordinary things remembered. A celebration of just being here, experiencing the world. The experience itself is somehow lost in the process, and, anyway, its not intended that it should be conveyed. The result is a picture animated by that experience.”

Dennis continued, “A painting starts with an exuberance. It’s good to be alive. The work is a wonderful place. The feeling seems to cover everything, but it relates especially to past experiences, beginning further back than I can remember. It becomes specific in associations with past experiences: Portland, Eastern Washington, Africa; but not with an exact description. The memory of a precise place and time – a moment of past reality is too terrible to bear, there is such a sense of loss, of things gone forever. So it is a present experience, based on the past. And perhaps the cartoon character adds the levity to remove it from the past, or ‘animate’ it in the present.”

Lockwood Dennis paintings have been collected by the following museums and organizations: Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington; Seattle Art Commission, Seattle, Washington; Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, Oregon; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington; Swedish Medical Center Foundation, Seattle, Washington; Museum of History and Industry, Seattle, Washington; Jefferson Museum of Art and History, Port Townsend, Washington; Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington; Clallam County Historical Society, Port Angeles, Washington; Bainbridge Island Art Museum, Winslow, Washington; US Library of Congress, Washington, DC; US State Department, Washington, DC.

Condition: Painting is in excellent overall condition. Signed at lower right and dated on verso.

Provenance: Lockwood Dennis Art Estate, Boulder, Colorado, USA

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