Dottie Lo Bue, a painter from central California, often wonders what makes a house a home. “The house is everywhere in story, in myth, in poetry, and advertisement,” she says. “It’s this anchor. It’s something to tie you to the world and protect you.” As children, Lo Bue and her brother would accompany their father to the construction sites where he worked, where they played in the staged model houses that his company built. The houses were “these kinds of liminal spaces,” she recalls. “There’s plastic fruit, and everything is perfect in them.” In Lo Bue’s paintings, the idea of home is infused with both safety and anxiety. Her new series, Think of Any Poem About a House, balances the softness and gentleness of a childhood home with elements of tension and surrealism.
Ghost, 2023, oil on Canvas, 30x40 inches. (Photo Credit: Nicholas Lea Bruno.)
Lo Bue begins each painting with a layer of quinacridone (an organic pigment often used to create high-performance paints) magenta. The cool-red shade, even if mostly obscured in the finished work, creates an optical illusion—the longer a viewer looks at the painting, portions of it appear white, then magenta, then white again. “Your eyes try to correct it in a way,” Lo Bue says. The series also contains other uncanny elements, like windows floating unattached to walls and pink gardens blooming against black or navy backgrounds, hinting at a hum of discontent in an otherwise tranquil home. Mostly, though, painting these scenes—and painting in general—gives Lo Bue a deeper clarity about the world amid her own struggles with anxiety. “[It] can kind of quiet everything else for a time,” she says. “There’s something in the searching process, in finding the right color, the right brushstroke, that feels important in the moment.”
