The joy of expressing herself
Grand FallsWindsor artist Alice Dicks continues to evolve
At 85 years old, Alice Dicks’ artistic curiosity and imagination has not wavered. Dicks, a painter and printmaking living in Grand FallsWindsor, still loves to make art and continues to find new means of expression. While she has been painting her entire life, her interests are still evolving.
“I’ve been doing realism and plein air painting for quite a while, you know travelling and painting and I just wanted something new,” she tells Central Wire.
In just the last five years, she has started exploring the realm of abstraction, expressing herself through the immediacy of motion and colour.
“I quite like some abstract work and dislike a lot of abstract work,” she says. “So, I’m trying to kind of thread the needle a little bit, trying to find my own expression. It’s very freeing, it frees you. You don’t have to worry about painting within the lines or anything like that.”
Dicks says sometimes people will look at the abstract art of painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and suggest it is something a child can do. But Dicks claims that’s not how it works.
“You have to put your emotion into your brushstroke and your colour and your angles,” she says.
She feels the beauty of abstract art is you don’t have to plan it: it’s like closing your eyes and drawing a line.
“So, when you open your eyes, then you have a pattern on your canvas,” she explains. “So, then, if you want to follow that, you can, but usually I go away from that, and it does wake up the canvas.”
AN ARTISTIC LIFE
As a youth growing up in Corner Brook, Dicks had a knack for art.
“I just liked painting from day one,” she says. “When I went to school, I used to get really good marks in art.”
Both her parents encouraged an interest in the arts.
Her mother Mary Pittman was a writer who published under the pen name Len Margaret and worked as a schoolteacher. She also taught English to foreign language immigrants at night school. Her father Alphonsus Pittman was a teacher who taught gymnastics, Latin, and according to Dicks, was a great storyteller and singer.
“My father and my mother always encouraged us to do things like writing and drawing and anything that involved the arts, acting when the school had plays and stuff like that,” she recalls.
Multiple siblings would go on to be artists, including her brother Ken, her sister Eileen and the writer Al Pittman.
Despite her interest and her abilities, in Dicks’ time, it was always expected of girls to grow up to be a nurse or teacher. She became a nurse. The thought never occurred to her that she could someday become a professional artist. But Dicks kept learning and improving her artistry. She took classes with Reginald Sheppard of the NL Academy of Art and since has had countless mentors, learning from artists across the Maritimes, Europe and in Ottawa.
She also studied printmaking at St. Michael’s Print Shop.
When she retired from nursing about 30 years ago, she started to focus on her art as her professional career and built a studio onto her Grand Falls-Windsor home where she continues to create practically every day.
She has taught art on and off for even longer. Since the pandemic she has stopped teaching but is considering starting classes again this fall.
“I like the fact that when a student realized they could really do it, when it dawned on them that this wasn’t out of reach,” she explains. “And I appreciate it the most when they started to do their own thing, they would just go outside the lines and do their own creations.”
Dicks’ work has been exhibited several times through the years, including 27 pieces recently as part of a Retrospective of her work at the Grand Falls-Windsor Arts and Culture Centre.
Her art can be found in collections of the government of Newfoundland and Labrador and many private collections across North America.
She is a founding member of the Central Newfoundland Visual Art Society and has served on its executive for many years. Dicks has also served on several other artrelated boards, provincially and nationally, such as the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council.