Dubord belongs to the small contemporary cohort of French painters who have continued to work seriously in the late-nineteenth-century post-Impressionist tradition, landscape, light, atmosphere, the close observation of a particular place, at a moment when most of French painting has moved on, and his work is rooted unambiguously in the Norman tradition that produced Monet, Pissarro, and the early Impressionists.
Dubord came to painting from inside the city most closely identified with the early Impressionist movement. Rouen, the cathedral that Monet painted across the seasons, the Seine that Sisley and Pissarro worked, the Norman countryside that produced the broader visual culture of late-nineteenth-century French landscape painting, was the immediate visual world of his childhood, and the landscape he has spent his career returning to.
His formal training was deliberate but unconventional. The art history and decorative arts course he completed in Paris gave him a thorough grounding in the broader European tradition rather than in the practice of painting itself; the technical development of his work has been largely self-directed, built from his own study of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist masters and from sustained painting from observation in the Norman landscape.
His emergence as a working painter began with the strong local reception of his first Rouen exhibition. He continued to develop his practice through the 1970s and 1980s, building a body of paintings concentrated on Normandy subjects, the quays of Rouen at different hours of the day, the Seine in its various moods, the chalk cliffs and beaches of the Norman coast, the small working towns of the river valley, and extending his subjects into Paris and the broader French landscape.
The mature work is characterized by a careful attention to light and atmosphere, a tonally subtle palette, and a handling of paint that owes a clear debt to the loose brushwork and broken color of the late-nineteenth-century French painters who established the visual vocabulary in which he works. He has been described in critical and gallery sources as one of the leading living representatives of the Rouen school of post-Impressionist landscape painting.
He has continued to exhibit and accumulate a substantial body of work across more than fifty years, and his career constitutes a sustained meditation on the landscape and light of Normandy, a regional commitment that has given his painting its particular shape and range.