Dorothy Fagan is an American painter whose work emerges from a sustained, decades-long engagement with the landscapes of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Fagan works from her pond landscape, creating life-size paintings that function as mirrors of an energetic, physical connection to the earth.
Using a palette knife and willow branches alongside dense impasto and charcoal drawing, her process allows gesture and material to register movement, rhythm, and flow without interruption. Drawing and painting converge as equal forces, producing surfaces that retain the trace of pressure, erosion, and renewal.
Fagan holds a BFA in Printmaking and Painting from East Carolina University. Her training in printmaking sharpened an early attentiveness to drawing, texture, and layered surfaces, which expanded organically throughout the late 1970s and 1980s as she produced pastel landscapes across Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York. Many of these early works focused on woodland streams near their Appalachian sources, establishing water as a central structural and emotional element in her practice.
A significant shift occurred in 2013 during a residency at the Musée de La Grande Vigne in Dinan, France, where Fagan began exploring the tension between organic and man-made structures within the landscape. This investigation continued through subsequent residencies in Italy, notably in Loro Ciuffenna, where she developed a heightened awareness of underground waterways and their unseen influence on surface forms. Returning to the United States in 2018, these experiences coalesced into a more embodied mode of painting.
Fagan’s work is held in private, corporate, and institutional collections in the United States and internationally, including the Musée de La Grande Vigne, City University of New York, Camp Lejeune Mental Health Center, and Vir Biotechnology.
