Local artist Dike Blair’s Catskill landscape paintings
Catskill Art Space presents Eyes, Skies and Pools, a solo exhibition by painter Dike Blair, providing a meditation on perception, place, and the act of looking. Each summer, the organization invites an artist local to the region to transform the Main Street-facing galleries. The exhibition premiered Saturday, June 27, with an artist’s talk, and will be on view through August 29, 2026. The opening weekend corresponds with Upstate Art Weekend, an artist-forward, region-rooted arts festival throughout the Hudson Valley and Catskills, fostering meaningful exchange with aligned creative communities beyond the region.
In Eyes, Skies and Pools, Blair turns his attention to the landscape of the Catskills, rendering skies and pools in gouache. Many paintings draw from photographs taken near his home and studio in the Catskills; the sky paintings capture the expansive atmosphere of the region while grounding it in its seasonal specificity—leafless trees, low winter light, and fleeting moments of weather and illumination. Subtle traces of human presence—airplane trails, chimney smoke—hover within these compositions, echoing the artist’s longstanding interest in quotidian life.
Complementing these works, Blair’s pool paintings invite close attention to surface and depth. Their green tonalities recall the lushness of the Catskills, yet within the contained geometry of the pool they take on an uncanny, almost cinematic quality. Light fractures across the water, while mechanical elements such as pool cleaners animate the stillness, disrupting and reorienting the viewer’s gaze.
Sculptural works punctuate the exhibition, extending Blair’s practice into three dimensions. These crate-based constructions alter the architecture of the galleries, requiring viewers to move around them and engage shifting perspectives. Incorporating framed works on paper and painted surfaces, the sculptures blur distinctions between image and object, stability and illusion.
Installed between the galleries, a large-scale presentation of Blair’s Eyes series introduces a rare engagement with the human form. Disembodied and suspended, these images—drawn from friends and loved ones—return the viewer’s gaze, creating an encounter that is at once intimate and disquieting.
The exhibition resonates with James Turrell’s Avaar, permanently installed on the second floor of CAS, in its shared invitation to slow looking and perceptual awareness. Across media, Blair’s work emphasizes duration, attentiveness, and the conditions of seeing itself.
Reflecting on his work as containing “a fair amount of nothingness,” Blair resists nihilism through a practice that is both formally rigorous and deeply attuned to lived experience. Eyes, Skies and Pools ultimately offers viewers a renewed awareness of perception—one that is present, open, and alive.
The presentation is joined by an eponymous catalog produced by Catskill Art Space, with a new critical essay by Cameron Martin expanding on the “psychic charge” of Blair’s work. The catalog will be available for purchase at the opening and beyond.
Major underwriting support for the exhibition and accompanying catalogue is provided by Karma, with generous support from Sullivan Catskills Visitors Association.
About the Artist
Dike Blair (b. 1952, New Castle, Pennsylvania) uses gouache, oil, his own photographs, and strategies appropriated from Postminimalist sculpture to create intimate tableaux that transform quotidian sights and materials into exercises in formalism. A writer and teacher as well as an artist, Blair came up in the downtown scene of 1970s New York among punk rockers and Postmodernists. In the early 1980s, against prevailing art world trends toward Neo-Expressionism, he began rendering scenes from his life in gouache on paper.
These ongoing diaristic paintings are devoid of human figures but nonetheless evoke the specter of the artist whose daily life plays out at a remove across their finely-wrought surfaces. Blair lives in New York and Sullivan County.
Catskill Art Space
Following a major renovation and expansion, Catskill Art Space reopened in October 2022 with a long-term presentation of James Turrell’s Avaar (1982) in a custom-built gallery on the building’s second floor. A room-sized installation, Avaar is an important example of the artist’s early, wall-based “aperture” works, which function by creating two areas within a room. There is a “viewing space,” where one stands to see and experience the work, and a “sensing space,” which is an ambiguously defined area of diffused light. Avaar is one of the rare examples of Turrell’s aperture works to make use of white lighting only; no colors will be present in the installation. This work is in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, which has granted CAS a special long-term loan to exhibit the work. The presentation at CAS marks the first time the work has been shown since the 1970s, giving audiences from the Catskills and beyond the rare opportunity to experience a major Turrell work that has not been seen in nearly five decades.
On the second floor’s central landing, Sol LeWitt’s vibrant Wall Drawing #992 unfolds in three sections, each consisting of 10,000 straight lines drawn in color marker, to create a mesmerizing arrangement of primary colors. On the fourth wall, presenting LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #991, straight, arced, and organic lines will encompass the wall in black marker and pencil. The conceptual, minimalist artist conceived guidelines for his two-dimensional works to be drawn directly on the wall. Much like Turrell’s Avaar, the LeWitt works were realized for CAS’s space; in this instance, they are generously loaned by the artist’s estate. This work was overseen by a draftsperson, who determines the length and placement of the lines, and executed by five artists local to the area over nearly two weeks.
The performance space on CAS’s second floor hosts British sculptor Francis Cape’s A Gathering of Utopian Benches—an installation of meticulous copies of benches built and used by communal societies. Cape’s installations have always argued that design and craft express belief. Utopian Benches, which has toured extensively throughout the US, was built from poplar grown near Cape’s studio in Narrowsburg, NY. To be considered both as contemporary sculpture as well as furniture that visitors can actively use, the benches reference the societies who first used them, inviting visitors to utilize them for exchange, discourse, and community. The installation, which is meant to be used by visitors both for contemplation and may be used for performance seating, overlooks an expansive wall of windows onto the Willowemoc Creek.
