John Dilg

[8] By the 1980s, his paintings featured more regular, dark lines separating abstract planes of color that engaged the picture edges; writers compared them to the work of Richard Diebenkorn and—despite their abstraction—to the quirkier Chicago Imagists.

[4][25][26][27][28] In the 2000s, Dilg shifted to small, exactingly composed paintings of iconic, glyph-like forms that ranged from fully abstract shapes to barely recognizable animals and landscape elements, as in Hide (2001); New York Times critic Ken Johnson described them as exuding "a modest archetypal mystery.

[16][7][2] They bring together diverse sources and precedents in a singular, personal vision—among them, 19th-century chromolithography, Japanese woodcuts, Early Renaissance landscapes, self-taught art, vintage postcards and game boards, thrift-store paint-by-number paintings and handmade signs.

[8][36] His carefully selected and composed pictorial elements often tap into the power of primal subjects: waterfalls and gorges (e.g., On Another Planet, 2012), towering sequoia forests and evergreens, and formations like Yosemite's Half Dome that evoke the American West of 19th-century artists like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, as well as the Gothic, moonlit landscapes of German Romantics, such as Caspar David Friedrich.

[8][45][1] Dilg works with a subtly shifting, restricted palette of celadon greens, pale blues, and sandy or greyed browns that has been described as evoking Midwest prairies, the veiled light created by misty Pacific Northwest rains, and deep geologic time.

[8][7][46][47] New York Times critic Jason Farago wrote that this restrained tonal range called to mind the color approaches of Giorgio Morandi, Agnes Martin and Luc Tuymans, as well as classical Korean ceramics.

[46][8][41][48] The Boston Globe's Cate McQuaid wrote that its "almost pictographic simplicity" and "incantatory energy" pulls viewers "into an intimate, low-key exchange, quiet and deeply felt"[3] while suggesting monumental forms and vast pictorial space.

[2][6] For example, in Approaching Future (2017), a shrinking glacier expels tiny ice floats topped with Christmas-tree pines into the sea; Improvements (2020) depicts a leveled forest-scape speckled with tree stumps resembling rock formations.