04 Jul Artist Spotlights: Melissa Dickenson

Melissa Dickenson’s large-scale, sensuously abstracted canvases take landscape painting far beyond plein air into a realm that could be called “plein terre.” The artist doesn’t merely survey and take visual notes on the scenes she’ll portray. She returns to her studio in San Francisco’s Mission District with containers of gathered materials, such as sandstone, ochre, limestone, clay, and even ashes gleaned from the remains of trees burned in the devastating 2019 Sonoma wildfires. From these, she grinds and mixes her own pigments, combining them with a fluid acrylic binder to make paints that imbue her canvases with the substance and spirit of her subjects.

“I think of myself as an interpreter of a place,” she says, summing up her work.

Dickenson spent her first two years in the high desert of New Mexico before moving with her mom just north of Boston. “Landscape is in my DNA,” she says of her family, which fostered close connections to nature and art. “On weekends, [my mom] always took us hiking. My dad, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, is also an artist-blacksmith. And when I’d visit my grandparents every summer in San Antonio, my grandfather entertained me by drawing detailed pictures of old-fashioned vehicles and buildings like the Alamo. So, I always felt I could make art, too.”

Gregorio Dusk | Gathered Earth Pigment, Azurite, Chrysocolla, Shale, Mudstone, Red Rock, and Acrylic on Canvas | 65 x 65 inches | 2024

In advanced placement art classes during Dickenson’s senior year of high school, she assembled an impressive portfolio that earned her a scholarship to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. “That set me up to pursue art as a career,” she says, “though I waited tables after I graduated.” Then, “needing to see what my next level was,” she earned a Master of Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, graduating in 2012.

During the following years, Dickenson focused first on Color Field painting, a form of Abstract Expressionism characterized by fields of flat color juxtaposed to provoke emotional responses. “But eventually, that wasn’t fun anymore.” Meanwhile, her large-scale abstractions began more and more to resemble landscapes, “and I wanted to start working outside.” Rather than lugging oversized canvases outdoors, she began bringing elements of the landscape into her studio, following guidance she gained through workshops with Washington artist and “ochre specialist” Heidi Gustafson and Taos artist and “pigment hunter” Scott Sutton.

Coyote Hill | Gathered Earth Pigment, Turmeric, Annatto, Charcoal, Ocher, Mudstone, Red Rock, and Acrylic on Canvas | 65 x 65 inches | 2024

In such recent paintings as Cachuma Point, inspired by a lakeside vista near Santa Barbara, Dickenson begins with myriad photos, from which she draws loose sketches that she posts in her studio to make “a whole wall of feeling.” Next, she grinds and sifts her natural pigments, mixes up her paints, and makes test strips. Then, using the drawings on the wall as a loose guide and eschewing brushes, she pours her paint in layers directly onto the canvas, moving the canvas and wiping the paint with her hands to direct its flow. She eschews brushes and instead directs the flow by moving the canvas and wiping with her hands. “In a way,” she says of a process that can take three to four months, “it’s almost like sculpting.”

Dickenson is represented by Maybaum Gallery in San Francisco, California. An exhibition of her recent work completed during a Chalk Hill Artist Residency will be on view at Chalk Hill Ranch in Healdsburg, California, on August 2.

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.