Newly hatched dinosaurs painted in spectral landscapes. Dinosaur eggs glowing in settings of cosmic color. This is what the artist Thomas Woodruff started painting during lockdown, up in his Hudson Valley studio. His friends were puzzled. “If we consider their fates,” Woodruff explains, “dinosaurs are pathos-plus! They are scaly chalkboard avatars to smudge and erase and calculate upon. They wander somewhere in the crags of our unconscious, hard to completely believe in, as much myth as fact. They allowed me to be fanciful during a trying time.” Woodruff turns 65 this year and admits that he feels a bit of a relic himself, like the dinosaur. Hence these “Dinosaur Variations.” —Laura Jacobs