Looking at the overlooked dolores mitchell “Everyone sees beauty in a rose, but an artist also sees beauty in a flat tire, a lump of mud, or a rusty tin can.” I believed those words spoken by my teacher in a Chicago Art Institute class for kids. At age 12, I remember sketching the back of a derelict three-story apartment building. Porches were jammed with refrigerators and mattresses and broken bottles glittered in the weeds, but as I sketched, I saw beauty in the lines, shapes, and shadows. I knew then that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up.
I continued to draw through high school, marriage, birth of a daughter, and getting degrees in painting and art history at UCLA. Although I didn’t have time and energy to paint during 30 years of teaching art history at CSUC, I continued to draw in museums, so I could explain to students how Matisse, for example, had structured his paintings. Retirement meant “re-purposement” to me. I helped run Avenue 9 Gallery, volunteered to work on Art at the Matador, and conducted KCHO art interviews. I also taught OLLI classes and developed “Art Talk,” a monthly
creativity blog. All of these opportunities I might not have had in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles, where I’d lived before Chico. And, one more thing, I started to paint again. I searched Chico and the countryside for painting motifs. Though I sketched such obvious beauties as the Senator Theater, rice fields, and the Sutter Buttes, I also drew what are often called eyesores—electricity pylons, prickly weeds, warehouses, water towers, and garbage bins. On a walk down the alley by my house, I 49
