"Honestly, I think some of us are just born with a bent toward transforming one thing into another. We're not happy unless we are doing so."
That's how Carol Dickie explains her inspiration to make art. She says her interest was piqued when she was in high school, enchanted by the photography of Ansel Adams, and it was the darkroom that first drew her in when she was in college.
FAQ
‘Solitude’:
Paintings by Carol Dickie
WHEN — 10 a.m.-6 p.m. today through Sunday with a reception from 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday
WHERE — Beaver Lake Office of Century 21, 321 Mundell Road in Eureka Springs
COST — Free; artworks will be for sale
INFO — Email caroldickieart@gmai…
"Black and white photography taught me composition and how important it is in each image to have a true dark and a clean white," the Eureka Springs artist says. "I really wasn't into paintings -- or even color photography, for that matter -- until well into my 30s."
Instead, Dickie did all the things artists do before they follow their muse full time. She worked as a journalist and a public relations writer, then taught journalism at Texas Woman's University. "But I really hated being trapped indoors, so I started my own landscaping company. I learned about flowers and combining colors and design."
The rest is serendipity. She and partner Robyn bought a fifth-wheel and an old Dodge diesel truck, sold their home and left Texas to go west and see "that country that Adams had so eloquently captured in his photographs."
"As we traveled from one natural wonder to the next, I felt the old desire to communicate my passion for nature getting stronger," she remembers. Then she took a workshop with Stephen Quiller, who had been working with mixed watermedia for 30 years, and "his instruction, coupled with what I had gleaned along the way, lit a fire."
"A few months later, we were driving west on U.S. 62 headed, I thought, to fly fish on the White River below Bull Shoals Lake," Dickie picks up the story. "It was late, the road was curvy and narrow, and we saw a sign for camping at Beaver Lake. We took that fateful turn and stumbled on this most beautiful place. Within days, we were looking for a home. Two weeks later we bought a fixer-upper on Beaver Lake.
"Eureka Springs was really just a bonus -- one of the quirkiest of towns filled with amazing, creative, open people who deeply care about each other and the world."
Dickie says she keeps painting because she loves "this world of light and shadow, trees and frogs, dirt and sky. And I do so now with some urgency, not only because I am aging, but also because so many of the places I love are in peril. It is impossible now to go west and not see the startling difference from even 10 years ago: forests full of dead and dying trees, huge swaths of fire ravaged wilderness, fracking wells with their incessant rumblings next to fishing accesses on the San Juan River."
The paintings in this weekend's show and sale "all deal with place, a moment, some beautiful, magical confluence of light and angle that has caught my attention."
"Solitude is the requirement for each of these moments. In solitude, I find, the world opens to me and I become both participant and observer -- and observed," she says. "The jangle of light and shadow, the unnerving, ethereal connection -- all can be found, by anyone, in solitude."
NAN What's Up on 05/24/2019