Working from his own photographs of subjects such as cigarette packets, blossoming flowers, snacks, liquor glasses and coffee cups, doors and desolate, night time scenes, Dike Blair creates intimate, diaristic tableaux paintings. Illustrated with hundreds of recent works, this expansive monograph presents Blair’s paintings in oil to date, as well as featuring a reprint of a formative 2018 essay on the artist by Helen Molesworth and new scholarship by Jim Lewis and Christine Robinson.Blair's depictions of food evoke the soft palette and bird's-eye perspective of Wayne Thiebaud, while his window views and landscapes combine the modernism of Edward Hopper with the photorealistic eye of William Eggleston. After using gouache for decades, Blair began working in oil in 2017; the resulting noir-like scenes retain the artist’s signature style, but imbue his works with a particular novel lustre.
336 pages, 27.9 x 26 cm, hardcover, Karma (New York).