Process

Paul Dodd "Shoes On Silver" 1976, acrylic on canvas 36" x36"
Paul Dodd “Shoes On Silver” 1976, acrylic on canvas 36″ x36″

Beth Brown, Russ Lunn, Heather Erwin and Jim Mott have rented space in the Anderson Alley building, space that was a shoe factory when Rochester had many. My grandparents worked in shoe factories here. In fact, my aunt gave my father this tiny pink shoe made of leather, a sample from the shoe factory their father had worked in. I was called a “Superba”.

One of the only things I accomplished this summer (4D work doesn’t count) was organizing the garage. There were some tools out there and that were almost impossible to get at. I threw away a bunch of old paintings and one of them was the shoe painting above. I did it while I was in school and I had forgotten all about it. I found a big roll of white paper in the garage, something my father had given me when he used visit the Kodak surplus building before coming home from work. I also attempted to deal with the piles of stuff in our office and I did decided to throw away the light table we haven’t used in about twelve years.

I photographed the tiny shoe on my brother’s picnic table and did a few drawings from the photo and then a few small watercolors of it. I brought the scale up to oversize and it looked less like a woman’s shoe and almost like it could fit a nineteenth century dandy. I simplified the drawing and created a pattern that I put on the light table and then unrolled the white paper over the pattern as I painted one shoe after another.

It will be in the show when it opens on Friday, November 5th.

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