Near the Bay

Following a 1981 trip to
Egypt, where she amassed handfuls of beautifully printed papers, Dorothy Hood
launched into a series of collages that were to occupy her for more than a
decade. She found in collage an intimate, creative outlet that was less
demanding than her large canvases, and she also appreciated the lineage of
collage in both Cubist and Surrealist art. Reviewing Hood’s first exhibition of
these new works in 1982, Mimi Crossley observed, “They are put together in
surrealist compositions—a surrealism not made
by juxtaposing images full of content, but created by placing shapes on shapes,
texture against color, until a dreamlike world is born in toto.” Hood’s first collages
tended to be vertical, with a compositional flow that was not dissimilar to her
paintings. As the series evolved, however, Hood began to insert increasingly
narrative elements.