Finding her groove
Addren Doss, The Welcoming Committee, oil, 16 x 16.
This story was featured in the July 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
WHEN ADDREN DOSS signed up for a mechanical drawing class in high school, she boldly set a precedent. “This was in 1966, and they didn’t allow girls to take that class,” says Doss, for whom the school decided to make an exception—and fortunately so, because she relished the course. After high school, the Atlanta, GA, native snagged work as a draftsman for a few years before landing a job as a graphic artist with the Federal Reserve. “And then I met my husband Ken, and we moved to North Carolina, and I did some freelance work,” says the artist.
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- Addren Doss, All Ears, pastel, 18 x 24.
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- Addren Doss, Afternoon Buildup, pastel, 14 x 11.
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- Addren Doss, Cotton Top, pastel, 16 x 12.
By this time, Doss was in her early 30s, and Ken suggested she do something for herself. “One thing led to another,” says the artist, who enrolled in painting classes at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Around that time, she came across an impressive book by painter Albert Handell and promptly signed up for one of his workshops, and then another, and another. Over the years since then, Doss has taken around a dozen classes with Handell. “Albert taught me how to paint in pastel and in oil, and he instilled in me my love of plein-air painting,” she says. “It changed my work more than anything else.”
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- Addren Doss, Bad Hair Day, pastel, 12 x 12.
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- Addren Doss, Mountain Time, oil/cold wax, 18 x 24.
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- Addren Doss, Daniel, oil, 12 x 16.
Today, Doss generally works from multiple plein-air studies in her studio, where she has been using palette knives and a blend of oils and cold wax that give her landscape work sculptural depth with nuanced, thick and thin fields of color. “It’s getting a little more abstracted, and I’m more interested in textures and rhythms,” says the artist of her recent work. “It’s always in the back of my mind that I have to find the pathway for the viewer’s eye to move throughout the composition.”
Doss is also passionate about painting cows, and her eye for capturing them hasn’t gone unnoticed. Last year, her pastel portrait of a white-faced Hereford cow appeared in the Women Artists of the West show, and this fall, her oil painting of a trio of shaggy Highland cows appears in the group’s 49th national exhibition. The artist meets her subjects on her travels around the country, from rural Montana to North Carolina’s high country, and she has names for many of them. Naturally, bovines have a special place in her oeuvre. “I treat my cows like portraits,” Doss says. —Kim Agricola
representation
O’Brien Gallery, Greensboro, NC; www.addrendoss.com.
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- Addren Doss, Out Standing in His Field, pastel, 12 x 12.
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- Addren Doss, Shem Creek III, pastel, 12 x 16.
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- Addren Doss, Patch, pastel, 12 x 12.
This story was featured in the July 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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