Self-Portrait in Green Window, 1971; oil on linen, 53 1/2 x 36 inches; Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Museum purchase with support from the Contemporary Art Fund, in memory of Bernice McIlhenny Wintersteen.

“Lois Dodd: Catching the Light,” on view at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, is a disarming show.1The seemingly modest, straightforward paintings in this thoughtful survey (organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and largely chosen by the artist herself) draw us to them initially because of their comforting sense of familiarity. Dodd, like a musician with perfect pitch, never gets a tone wrong. Apparently without effort, she builds her pictures out of hues and values that conjure up particular seasons, times of day, and vagaries of weather. We recognize the mood and temperature of a crisp winter day, a voluptuous summer night, an equivocal morning in early spring, a sun-drenched autumn afternoon. If we know New England, Dodd’s austere clapboard houses and weathered barns (buildings in rural Maine, where she has spent summers for decades) have special resonance, but like her seemingly dispassionate accounts of northeastern landscapes, backyards, laundry lines, flowering trees, and garden close-ups, her Down East images also read as classic Americana that transcends geography. In the same way, while Dodd’s paintings of the interiors of her Lower East Side studio and the urban views from its windows may trigger instant recognition from her fellow New Yorkers, they require no particular knowledge of