Lot 286, Auction 4/20/2026: Lockwood Dennis Painting – “Cement Plant” (1990)

$455.00

In stock

Lockwood “Woody” Dennis (American, 1937-2012). “Cement Plant” oil on canvas, 1990. Signed at lower right and dated and titled on verso. A monumental stillness hums at the heart of this painting, where silos stretch skyward like modern obelisks and a lone orange truck rests at the edge of industry. With “Cement Plant”, painted in 1990, Lockwood Dennis captures the lyrical quiet of Seattle’s industrial architecture – not as blight, but as place, presence, and memory. Rendered in his signature graphic yet painterly hand, Dennis flattens perspective into a patchwork of matte planes and shadowed contours. The concrete towers dominate the composition like vertical cliffs, their forms softened by ochre light and a velvet dusk sky in hues of rose and smoke. A truck glows in the foreground like a smoldering ember, its angular silhouette edged in black. Curving walls, stacked blocks, and sweeping ramps draw the eye with rhythmic geometry, suggesting motion halted mid-breath. Size of painting: 19″ W x 24″ H (48.3 cm x 61 cm); of frame: 20″ W x 25″ H (50.8 cm x 63.5 cm)

Dennis, deeply influenced by Post-Impressionism, WPA muralism, and Japanese printmaking, bridges observation and memory here. The painting echoes his belief that “the impetus to paint is always an experience – a specific place, weather, ordinary things remembered.” For him, the cement plant was not just machinery or monotony but a stage where time, color, and form could perform in harmony. Set against the backdrop of Seattle’s shifting industrial waterfront, this work speaks to Dennis’s enduring fascination with the overlap of the man-made and the natural, the remembered and the real. With mood distilled into color and silhouette, the painting is both an ode to the workaday and a meditation on impermanence.

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, it’s 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: Signed at lower right and dated and titled on verso. Mounted in custom wood frame with suspension wire on verso for display. Some marks to frame, but painting is in excellent overall condition.

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

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