Artist's biography
"The teacher of the toe is the stone that stubs it," comments Dominic, when asked about his education. "I have had many teachers, some animate, some inanimate, some famous, others forgotten or never known." His development as an artist, he says, has been a process of honing his skills to express his intuitions more accurately.
Dominic has been painting and drawing for as long as he can remember. Brought up on farms in Massachusetts and in the Champlain Valley of Vermont, he spent much time as a child alone with the land and its creatures, and became closely attuned to the harmonies between inner and outer nature, the resonance and rhythms of light, color and mental state. His lively imagination and affinity with nonhuman life forms has expressed itself in stories, poetry, sculpture and graphic work as well as in painting
Residing for many years in Milton, Massachusetts, Dominic established an etching studio there and helped launch the Boston Bronze Foundry. He worked in monotype, woodcut and pastel as well as in oil and acrylic, and exhibited regularly at The Nasrudin Gallery in Boston, The Voyagers and the Paul Schuster Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before moving to Vermont in 1985. Recurrent themes already included gardens and gardeners, blind men with flowers, the alliances between humans and wild creatures, and an ongoing dialogue with trees and light.
In Vermont Dominic has focused largely on landscape, both observed and imagined, in his paintings. Long walks in the woods in search of wild mushrooms heightened his sensitivity to the subtleties of microcosm and macrocosm, and his love affair with the dawn light in the mountains surprised even himself by evolving into an extended series of visionary waterfall paintings. His carved relief sculptures in black walnut, applewood and poplar body forth extraordinary beings in association with lions, leopards, owls, butterflies and the plant world, and recently he has embarked on a series of pencil drawings which combine delicacy of execution with an unexpected blend of poetry, precision and whimsy.
Dominic is not much inclined to discuss interpretations of his work. "Why do you ask me to explain in words what I’m doing in paint?" he wonders. " It does not translate. It’s like being used to peonies, and then seeing a daisy. The temptation is to try to find a way to...peony it." Besides, he cautions, any successful work of art is an active experience, ever expanding and contracting in accordance with the surroundings and perceptions of the viewer, so it can never be defined effectively.
His titles, however - some lyrical, some humorous, some narrative - often suggest a context. "They tell a story, but the paintings or drawings are not illustrations of it, they’re the thing itself. The problem is, they’re fragmentary. There’s no way you can understand the whole by analyzing the fragments: time and space are both a prison and a playpen." If you can look into a work of art unreservedly, he suggests, you may be quite surprised at the world that opens up to you; and what you find may be unique to you. "One would like to make a painting which serves as a catalyst, in which every person of every color and stripe would see that there was value but would not know what it was, and would stand before it long enough to take from it what they needed."
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2007 Hingham Harbor Gallery, Hingham, Mass.
2006 Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, Vermont (sculpture)
2003 Solaris Gallery, Califon, New Jersey
1998-2006 The Well of Stars, Lake Elmore, Vermont
1998 The Red Mill Gallery, Johnson, Vermont
1997 The Red Mill Gallery, Johnson, Vermont
1996 Chittenden Gallery, Montpelier, Vermont
1994 The Well of Stars, Lake Elmore, Vermont
1993 The Red Mill Gallery, Johnson, Vermont
1992 The Well of Stars, Lake Elmore, Vermont
1990 The Red Mill Gallery, Johnson, Vermont
1989 Workplace Gallery (VCA), Montpelier, Vermont
1985 The Voyagers, Cambridge, Mass.
1983 The Voyagers, Cambridge, Mass.
1979 The Voyagers, Cambridge, Mass.
1976 The Nasrudin Gallery, Boston, Mass.
1975 The Nasrudin Gallery, Boston, Mass.
1974 The Nasrudin Gallery, Boston, Mass.
1973 The Nasrudin Gallery, Boston, Mass.
1970 Paul Schuster Gallery, Cambridge, Mass.
1969 Paul Schuster Gallery, Cambridge, Mass.
1968 Paul Schuster Gallery, Cambridge, Mass.
1966 David Bourbeau Gallery, Northampton, Mass.
