Bursting out to the edge
“I WANT THEM ( THE PAINTINGS) TO BE EXPANSIVE. I DON’T PUT THEM IN A FRAME, SO I PAINT AROUND THE EDGE IN A KIND OF CONTINUUM.”
Perfect circles. Perfect squares. Primary colors.
That’s the overall impression of the embroidered collages and oil paintings displayed inside the Garden Cafe at Greenwich Hospital where Carol Dixon is having the latest of her many solo exhibits. It also captures a paradox.
Dixon’s art is uniform only in its exterior dimensions, making it the inverse of the kind of abstract art often associated with rigorous use of geometry and color. In her circular embroideries and square paintings, color swirls in boundary bursting currents.
Of the 24 pieces in the Garden Cafe show, most are embroidered collages 13- inches in diameter, portholes matted in square frames. Some like the serene blue and white “Cloud Waves” and the color crowded “Beach Day” might be recognizable even without their titles ( provided in a printed guide).
“Cloud Waves” looks like a painting in thread of a sky or ocean. The even more pictorial “Beach Day” contains clearly identified elements, like the trio of red and yellow sun hats surrounding a blue and white tube of suntan lotion that is the embroidery’s focal point. “Beach Day” also has tricks.
The sun hats are actually photographs, Dixon reveals in an interview. And some striped beach towels are trompe l’oeil, a combination of embroidery and photograph. “It’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. It’s called fool the eye,” she says, with a chuckle.
Other embroideries are more purely abstract as are the oil paintings, which are larger at 30 or 36 inches square. Most have a floral appearance, confirmed by their titles. In some, the pattern declares itself without study, while others are dizzyingly free form.
“Iris Explosion,” a pinwheel of blue, red, green and yellow, is one of the paintings that seems barely constrained by its square canvas.
“Yes, it bursts out to the edge,” Dixon says. “I want them ( the paintings) to be expansive. I don’t put them in a frame, so I paint around the edge in a kind of continuum.” Abstract artists often paint the sides of their canvases to some degree, she says. But she faithfully extends the colors and lines on the surface over the edge.
Dixon also says she sometimes works on an embroidery and its painting counterpart at the same time. There are no pairs in the Garden Cafe show. But examples are plentiful. In June, Dixon had six embroideries in a “Focus on Textures” exhibit at the Ridgefield Guild of Artists. Two of them, “Floral Color Burst” and “Sunlit Woods,” reappear as paintings in Garden Cafe show.
Dixon is an active exhibitor. A detailed, but unposted, resume she provided lists a dozen juried or invitational shows so far this year where her work has appeared. According to a quick count, the solo show at the Garden Cafe is her 43rd. Most have been in Greenwich and Stamford. How did she manage so many? “Well, that’s because I’m 85 years old,” she says.
Since moving to Greenwich in 1972, she has been a pillar of the arts community. She’s a board member and past president of the Greenwich Art Society, a lifetime member and former artist trustee of the Silvermine Guild Arts Center, an operating member of the National Association of Women Artists. ( One of her exhibits this year was at the NAWA gallery in New York City, for photography.) That’s an abridgment of her associations.
She is an active teacher, too, in the Stamford Adult Education program and at the Greenwich Art Society
School, where she coteaches a course in critique and collaboration with society President Anna Patalano. For almost 30 years, she was on the faculty of the Greenwich Academy, where she alternately chaired the arts department and the history department.
“Over the years, I’ve taught American history, European history, and economics,” she says, in addition to art and art history. “I did teach a course in computer art for a time,” she says, explaining how she inserted the sun hat photographs into her “Beach Day” embroidery.
Dixon grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, near her Russian- born grandmother who taught her embroidery and grandfather tailor who gave her fabric scraps to use in her first collages. She remembers passing his shop on the way to and from school, and velvet outfits he made for her and her sister.
She says she always did art, in school and after school. As an 8- year- old, she sketched Tom Sawyer in drawing classes at the Pratt Institute. In high school at the storied Erasmus Hall, she spent the most time on her homework in art. After college, at Vassar, she went to Columbia for a master’s teaching degree in history. Her thesis was on the U. S. reaction to the 1848 revolutions in Europe, but her concentration in foreign policy allowed her to study other cultures.
In an artist’s statement, she lists Ming Dynasty robe appliqués along with the artists Wassily Kandinsky and Lee Krasner as influences and says she considers her small embroidered collages her most distinctive work. But asked why floral images, as abstract as they may be, show up so often in her work, Dixon gives a surprising answer, going back to high school.
“It’s interesting, but I think one of the influences was the Westingthouse Science Talent Search. My project was on the relationship between floral forms, mathematics and art,” she says.
In describing her “Iris Explosion” painting, she says it’s like looking into the blossom from the top down. Explaining the recurrence of circles and squares, she says the choice is partly practical, at least for embroidery. Generally, she works on a standard- sized hoop. But the choice for both embroidery and painting remains a personal vision. Three acrylic collages she chose to include in the Garden Cafe show are all 17- inch circles.
“First of all I think when we see in our eyes, we see things almost in a circular surround or almost in a square surround. So the circle and square are usually the formats I use,” she says. “That just comes from me, how I feel. With open eyes, I see that surround.”
“The Art of Carol Dixon” exhibit presented by the Greenwich Art Society at the Garden Cafe runs to Oct. 2. At this writing, it was open for viewing weekdays from 8: 30 a. m. to 3: 30 p. m.
The Silvermine Guild’s “Summer Salon” exhibit, which is includes her embroidery “Butterflies Are Free,” runs to Aug. 20. The gallery there has been open by appointment.