OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Painter/sculptor Laddie John Dill was born in Long Beach, California in 1943. He graduated from Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, in 1968 with a BFA degree.
While Laddie John Dill was still in school, he and artist Chuck Arnoldi formed a small framing business, "Acme Framing Company", and the artists engaged in many serious discussions concerning what they considered to be the death of painting. After graduation from Chouinard, Dill worked as an apprentice printer at Gemini, located in West Hollywood, and had the opportunity to work closely with such established artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claus Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein. Dialog between artists of the 1970's resulted in experiments with materials previously not considered traditional art media, such as neon, sticks, wax, cement and the relationship of those materials to each other. Dill then moved on to working three-dimensionally and filled a room in his studio with 10,000 pounds of silica sand. It was there that Laddie John Dill mixed light and sand to create pieces which were more like painting than sculpture. During the 1970's Dill also began experimenting with wall pieces using cement in contrast with the smooth surface of glass. Using natural pigments, Dill incorporates in his work a wide range of colors from brick reds derived, from iron oxide, coal blacks from black sulphur, and yellows and naturally mined cobalt blues. Combinations of these natural pigments create a variety of brilliant but still "organic" colors. Dill?s works allude to the relationship between the visual and the verbal, its reductive, architectural form embodies elements of minimalism, conceptualism, and Light and Space sculptures. Dill lives and works in Venice, California.