Published: March 28, 2008 09:36 am         

Bonnie’s brush with bluebonnets

By Lacie Morrison
lmorrison@mineralwellsindex.com

With deft strokes of her paintbrush, clusters of brilliantly colored bluebonnets appear to almost grow from the canvas of Gordon resident Bonnie Dickson.

Known for her vivid bluebonnet landscapes, it’s almost ironic that Dickson’s first attempt at a bluebonnet was what she thought would be her last.

“The first painting of a bluebonnet I did, I said I’d never do it again, because they were so tedious,” she recalled. She hung her painting in her Azle, Texas, art shop where a Dallas art agent saw it.

“He said he could sell it,” Dickson said.

Later that day, she received a phone call. “He sold it that very day. He called me up and said to paint two more for the next week.”

That marked the beginning of a career in oil painting with bluebonnet landscapes.

Dickson grew up in Rhome, Texas, north of Fort Worth. Her mother, she remembered, loved working on crafts.

“My mother, she could draw and do a lot of craftwork. She just loved to do all that,” Dickson said. “She didn’t paint but she did floral arrangements.”

Growing up, Dickson didn’t focus on art too much. She explained that she drew in high school, “just playing around.”

After she graduated, Dickson went to work at the age of 19 for General Dynamics, where she met her husband, Rayburn Dickson, two years later.

“He was in the machine shop and I worked in the planning department [on the mezzanine],” she recalled. An invitation for a Coca-Cola led to a wedding three months later. They lived in Lake Worth for 10 years.

In 1961, Rayburn Dickson spent a little over two years with the U.S. Army. Upon his return, Bonnie Dickson recalled they moved to St. Louis, Mo., so her husband could get work. She stayed home, taking care of their first child, Lisa. Two years later, they moved “back to the same house in Lake Worth,” she recalled, where their son was born.

In 1969, the Dickson family moved to Azle to a bigger house.

“We liked the area. We stayed there for 35 or 36 years until we moved to Gordon,” Dickson said.

While in Azle, Dickson’s artistic talent began to bloom, nourished with drawing classes from the Fort Worth Art Museum.

“I wanted to learn how to do pastel painting. That got me started,” she said. “I was doing the pastels, chalk paintings, … when I got the chance to go to Weatherford College and sit in on some art classes.

“It was mainly a drawing class [though] they finally got into painting.”

Learning how to paint also involved attending a few artist workshops, including one taught by Jerry Yarnell, of Oklahoma. Yarnell is a well-known television artist, who instructed artists through a TV series called “The Inspiration of Painting.”

“He did a couple of workshops,” she remembered. “He had some really good shortcut techniques that I still use today.”

Dickson smiled as she recalled her very first painting.

“It was in that class at Weatherford,” she said. “I did a painting of the farm where I was born in Rhome (Texas).” It’s a painting she still has today.

The painter and student became the teacher around 1975. Dickson said there was an art teacher who taught community education in Springtown, Texas.

“She wanted me to take over,” she chuckled. “I went over there scared to death. There were 12 ladies. I really fooled them into thinking I could teach; they made it easy for me.”

In 1976, Dickson decided to open an art supply business in Azle, where she also taught art classes. Even though she closed the shop in 1987 to be with her mother when she was ill, Dickson continued to teach art students once a week in her home “because I didn’t want to quit my students.”

Since 1985, Dickson hasn’t quit her bluebonnet landscapes, either.

“It can be [difficult] but no, it’s a lot easier now.” Smiling, she added, “After you’ve done a thousand paintings, I believe I could do it in my sleep.”

The hardest part of bluebonnet landscapes, she noted, “is to get them different. It’s work getting things arranged differently.”

With more than 1,000 paintings finished, Dickson has painted all sizes of canvases, including one canvas she created herself.

“I like painting big paintings because they’re more impressive and you get the message across. I always want the viewer to feel they could almost step and walk into the painting,” she said.

Although she’s never painted murals on walls, “the largest bluebonnets painting was a 4-foot by 6-foot canvas and then I did a 6-foot by 7-foot waterfall with Hawaiian flowers.”

The waterfall painting required a custom canvas. Dickson explained she had to make the frame and stretch raw canvas over it. She then painted on acrylic paint, saturating the raw canvas, before painting the oil picture.

Dickson describes her style as “impressionism towards realism. I’m not so impressionistic that you have a hard time telling what it is.”

She added that she likes to work from pictures, combing multiple images in one painting. Rarely does she sketch her picture on the canvas beforehand.

“I just like to see things happen before my eyes on canvas,” she explained. “You do things unintentionally that look beautiful.”

When painting images of nature, Dickson said, “You try to get it look as much like His [God’s] work.

“You just lose yourself in it. It’s a good therapy.”

Dickson and her husband moved to Gordon about seven years ago.

“It’s very, very nice out here, laid back,” she commented. She added that her husband’s siblings live in Gordon and “we had the land here we wanted to retire on.”

She’s not quite retired from her painting, however. A prolific painter, Dickson said she has artwork hanging in galleries in Plano, Dallas, San Antonio, Grapevine and Thurber.

When asked if she thinks she’ll ever put down the paintbrush, Dickson replied, “I don’t see me doing that.”