Art of the Dog Ursula Dodge Designs
By Pam Gleason, Photography by gary knoll
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rsula Dodge’s dog designs are immediately recognizable. She paints each dog in bold colors with a vibrant background, often outlining the figure in red. The dogs are both simplified and strangely realistic, and the paintings seem to capture the essence of the animal, though not necessarily the minute details of his anatomy. Her designs can be found on posters, cards, prints, magnets and various home décor items. Ursula’s main focus today is a series of paintings that represents all the different breeds of dogs: Boxers, Golden Retrievers, Australian Shepherds, Bulldogs and so on. Each painting also includes a number of words that describe the breeds’ traits. The Pomeranian is “Bold {bright} attentive sharp-eyed busybody spirited {inquisitive} foxy.” The Bulldog is “Sweet-natured * Easy Going * Kind * Dignified * Resolute * Amiable * Frisky * Snores.” The Jack Russell is “Obsessive * Tenacious * Sociable * Brash * Tough * Watchdog*” and also “Hunter * Digger * Barker * Bright * Clever * Energetic*” “Ursula has gotten very good at distilling the breeds’ characteristic into a few words,” says her husband Eric Gum. “I start by going to the AKC website,” says Ursula. “And then I also visit trainers’ websites and see what they say about the dogs, and Eric will go the library and come home with stacks and stacks of books. We start reading, and we come up with a long list of adjectives. By the time the painting is done, I have narrowed it down to the best and most essential features. I try to get a balance between the funny naughty stuff and the noble, serious stuff.” Ursula and Eric recently relocated to Aiken from Washington State to get away from the cold, snowy winters and to enjoy the southern lifestyle. They are currently in the process of building a home in Three Runs Plantation, meanwhile renting a small hunt box, where they live along with their two horses and their wirehaired Dachshund, Miles Vorkosigan. This dog, a character in himself, is named after the protagonist in a series of science fiction books written by Lois McMaster Bujold. Although things are a little cramped, Ursula and Eric are running their business in their rented home. In one small, well-lit room, Ursula paints, using oils on paper. In another, she scans her paintings into a computer where she adds finishing touches. Then, Eric prints the designs onto photo paper, and affixes them to magnets, or makes prints, creating as many as 5,000 separate pieces in a week. The room where Ursula paints is lined with box after box of magnets, each depicting a different dog breed. For their mail order business, Eric and Ursula fill all the orders themselves, communicating with clients and making regular trips to the post office to ship out the products. The cards, prints and magnets are also available at select stores throughout the nation. “I have found, especially in smaller cities, that it works best to have a flagship store,” says Ursula. “That’s why you’ll see in all my advertising here that my designs are available exclusively at Aiken Dry Goods downtown. Ursula has been working on the dog breed project for four years and has created several hundred dog paintings. Not only does she paint each breed, she paints the different types of each breed. For instance, she has several colors of Dachshund, as well as wire-haired and smooth coated varieties. She is working on various colors of Border Collie, and Boxers with both cropped and natural ears. She says that she likes to work from a high quality photo, and that she gets many of her photos from friends, as well as from customers who send in pictures of their dogs with the hope they will be chosen to represent the breed. “I love this business so much,” she says. “I’ve lived my whole life with
Spring 2013
that same connection to animals that probably everyone in Aiken has – that’s why we’re all here. So I love the subject matter. And then, there is something that happened to me after four years of painting the same thing over and over and over. The discipline of that has made me become a really good painter. It is an art exercise to paint the same thing every day.” Ursula attended the University of Washington, where she studied both painting and theater. While there, she took a job at a porcelain jewelry factory, where she started out as a production painter and ended up designing earrings and pins. Then, after graduating with her BFA, she bought a kiln and started her own company, creating and selling ceramic tiles at the Fremont Sunday Market in Seattle. Within a year, she had a thriving business, selling individual pieces as well as wholesaling to stores all over the country. The ceramic tiles led to licensing deals, and
soon her artwork was appearing on everything from greeting cards to coffee mugs, pet food bowls and paper plates. She and Eric moved to Montana as “an adventure” and pretty soon, her entire business was licensing, and her designs were mass-produced and featured on hundreds of different items. She had some pet designs – dogs and cats and horses – as well as insects, flowers and fish. With the downturn in the economy in 2008, many of her formerly lucrative licensing deals disappeared, so she and Eric moved back to Washington and went back to working directly with customers. They decided to focus on magnets for two main reasons. First, they are inexpensive, so everyone can afford to buy them. Second, they are lightweight, so they are easy to handle and ship. “We used to sell ceramic tiles,” she says. “Those were so heavy.” Since getting into the dog painting business, Ursula has been to many trade shows in the pet industry, which she says were a revelation to her. “What we noticed right away is that almost everyone in the pet industry is drawn to it because they’ve come to that point in their life where they want to do something that they’re passionate about. Either
The Dog & Hound
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